In the early 1920s, Rodia bought a triangular lot in Watts, Los Angeles and spent the next 30 years building 3 huge towers next to his house that still stand today--using only small hand tools, re-bar, coat hangers, cement, and stuff he found nearby. Two of the towers are over ninety five feet tall; Rodia himself was less than five feet tall. He had no ladder, no helpers, and no education. He influenced modern day builders with his structural methods and he was so admired by the Beatles that his image is on the album cover of Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, right beside Bob Dylan. And almost no one in LA today seems to know who he is.
Lisa and I went to LA for the weekend and decided to go see the Watts Towers. It wasn’t the easiest place to get to – our taxi driver had no idea what we were talking about when we asked him to take us there- and he sped away pretty fast after he let us out. We knew that the area wasn’t great – but I read today that Watts has the lowest median household income in all of LA and that 50 percent of people there live below the poverty line. It’s the home of huge riots in both the 60s and the 90s, and is where the infamous ‘bloods’ and ‘crips’ gangs hang out. So it was obviously a perfect place for two middle aged white Canadian moms to get dropped off with their luggage on a Friday afternoon.
All the structures Rodia built are behind a tall locked metal gate and fence (as are all the homes and trailers in the neighbourhood). If enough interested people gather and pay the $7 entry fee, one of the three women who work in the art centre building nearby will unlock the gate for a minute while they let in and lead a tour group. We aren’t allowed to touch the towers, but we can see up close how Rodia recycled pop bottles, broken plates, shells, tiles, and just about everything else he found at an abandoned factory nearby to decorate his work. He even decorated the floor by making impressions in it with heat vent grates and pieces of metal screen doors. Check it out:
In a few spots he pressed his simple tools into the cement along with his initials SR, the way Van Vogh would scribble ‘Vincent’ in the bottom right hand corner of a painting.
The towers were amazing and the African American and Hispanic women who worked there were great. They called us a taxi when the tour was over, and Lisa and I chatted with them for a few minutes about where we were from before we headed outside to wait for the cab. We sat in the California sunshine and talked for at least half an hour before one of the women stuck her head out of the art centre and called out “Hey! Vancouver!”
“Yeah?” I said.
“I called the cab again. It’s gonna be, like, 20 more minutes.”
“Okay, thanks.”
School had been out for a while when three tween African American girls walked by and started skipping double dutch behind us with two long ropes. They were obviously trash tracking each other, although the vernacular was so hard for me to understand that the only word I could pick out that they were saying to each other was nigger. We also witnessed a pit bull growling and biting a skateboard so fiercely on the street in front of us that none of a group of about twenty laughing teenage boys could get it away from him until one sprayed the dog’s face with water.
When the taxi showed up, over an hour after he’d been called, the driver didn’t even want to get out of the car, and he admonished us for going to that area. Later in the weekend I curiously asked another taxi driver if he knew what Watts Towers was and he had no idea. But he did say “YOU TWO went into Watts? Two WHITE girls?!” Why is race still so bloody complicated?
Rodia himself was Italian, but he asked someone local to translate the phrase ‘our town’ into Spanish and he inscribed Nuestro Pueblo on the entrance because he wanted it to be for everyone – and yet some people who lived nearby used to get their kids to purposely vandalize the towers anyway. Some say this is why after 30 years of building, he deeded the property to a neighour for free, walked away, and never returned (although he lived another ten years). And yet later when the city wanted to knock the towers down, people in the neighbourhood were some of the folks who rallied around to save them.
In any case, I came away from Watts Towers wanting to BUILD STUFF. I procrastinated like crazy about writing this today by cleaning out one big kitchen cupboard and found the following items I never use and can donate to my building project:
- 15 christmas tins
- The glass part of a blender for which I no longer have the base or lid
- A woven plate holder I have never figured out a use for…why would a plate need a holder?
- 2 jars of ancient jam I made once that was so solid that I broke a knife trying to spread it, but couldn’t bring myself to throw away because I’d worked so hard making it
- A spare fridge door tray from a fridge we no longer own
- A my little pony comb
- Parts of 2 different sets of popsicle molds
- A metal wine bottle holder we got for our wedding 17 years ago that we have never used
So…what can I MAKE? Any ideas?
And will you put me on your album cover?
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