Watts Towers

Listen first. A train rumbles past on the nearby tracks, and the wind moves through a lace of grey steel above your head. Close to the ground, the light catches something bright. It is a shard of green glass pressed into wet cement nearly a century ago. Then a blue tile. Then the curved ridge of a seashell. Everything here was set by hand, one fragment at a time, by one man who never asked permission.

You are standing in Watts, a working-class neighbourhood in South Los Angeles. In front of you rise the Watts Towers, a cluster of spires, walls, arches and fountains packed onto a narrow, triangular lot. The tallest two reach close to thirty metres. That is roughly the height of a ten-storey building. There are seventeen connected structures in all, and they look less like architecture and more like something that grew here.

The builder was Sabato Rodia, often called Simon. He was an immigrant from southern Italy who came to the United States as a young man. He worked as a labourer, a tile setter and a construction hand. Around 1921, he bought this small piece of land. He then spent more than thirty years building on it, mostly alone, in the evenings and on weekends after his regular work.

Here is the first thing most visitors miss. Rodia used no welding, no bolts and no scaffolding. He bent steel rods by hand, sometimes by wedging them under the nearby railway tracks. He wrapped the joints in wire mesh and sealed them with mortar. To climb, he used a window washer's belt and buckle, clipping himself to the frame as it rose. The towers grew upward as he climbed, each new ring holding the next.

Now look closely at the surfaces. The mortar is studded with broken plates, tiles, bottles, mirror pieces and shells. Much of the green glass came from soda bottles. Some pottery fragments carry patterns from Malibu tile and other California potteries of the era. Neighbourhood children reportedly brought him broken dishes and bottles. In a sense, the whole community's discarded household objects ended up inside this work.

Rodia had his own name for the place. He called it Nuestro Pueblo, Spanish for our town. He was an Italian man in a mixed neighbourhood of many backgrounds, and he chose a Spanish phrase. He spoke little about his reasons. When people asked why he built it, his answers were short. He said, in effect, that he wanted to do something big. The towers are that answer.

Walk along the outer wall and look down. Rodia pressed objects directly into the cement to leave impressions. You can find shapes of tools, corn cobs, hearts, and the outlines of hands. In places, his initials appear. These small marks are easy to overlook beside the tall spires. But they bring the scale back to one person, kneeling in the dirt with a trowel.

One structure near the base looks like a boat, with a tall mast rising from it. It is often called the Ship of Marco Polo. Rodia was proud of his Italian heritage, and explorers seem to have held a special place in his imagination. Whether he meant it as a ship, a monument or simply a shape he liked, it remains one of the most photographed corners of the site.

In the mid-1950s, Rodia stopped building. He was in his seventies. He gave the property away to a neighbour and moved to northern California. He never returned to live here, and he died in the 1960s. Legend and local memory say he rarely spoke about the towers afterwards. He simply walked away from three decades of work, as if the job were finished.

Then came the moment that almost erased it. By the late 1950s, the city considered the towers unsafe and ordered them demolished. A citizens' committee formed to save them. In 1959, they agreed to a public load test. Engineers attached a cable to one tower and pulled with a force of about ten thousand pounds. The tower did not fall. Instead, the testing equipment reportedly bent. Rodia's hand-wrapped steel held.

That test changed everything. The towers were saved, and the site later became a protected landmark. It was named a National Historic Landmark in 1990. Earthquakes, weather and time have all caused damage, including during the Northridge earthquake of 1994. Conservation work has continued for decades, and you may see sections under repair. Fragments still loosen and must be reset, much as Rodia once did himself.

Next door, the Watts Towers Arts Center has long served the neighbourhood with exhibitions, classes and music. Over the years, the towers have become more than an artwork. They are a source of local pride in a part of the city that outsiders often judged harshly. For many residents, these spires are a sign that something extraordinary can be built here, by someone ordinary, with what is at hand.

Before you leave, step back to the far side of the street. Let your eyes travel from the mosaic at the base up the thin ribs of steel to the very tips. Notice how the open lattice lets the sky show through. Listen again for the trains, the voices, the wind. Then look down at a single shard of glass near your feet... and remember that someone chose that piece, and set it there, by hand.