The Watts Towers and the Cathedral One Man Built

The Watts Towers and the Cathedral One Man Built

The Watts Towers at 1727 East 107th Street are seventeen interconnected structures of steel, mortar, and found objects that rise up to 99 feet from a residential lot in Watts — built by one man, Simon Rodia, over 33 years, with no engineering training, no machinery, and no clear explanation of why except that he wanted to do something big and he did it.

Rodia was an Italian immigrant, a tile setter by trade, and from 1921 to 1954 he climbed his own scaffolding — built from pipe and rebar, held together by his own welding — and pressed into the mortar whatever the city left at his feet: broken tiles, seashells, pottery shards, bottle caps, mirrors, and seventy thousand pieces of abalone shell that catch the Southern California light and throw it back in a green-blue shimmer that makes the towers glow like something between a coral reef and a cathedral.

He worked alone. He never drew a plan. He never asked for a permit. When he finished, he gave the property to a neighbor and moved away, and the city promptly tried to demolish the towers, arguing they were unsafe. An engineer tested them by attaching a cable to the tallest tower and pulling with 10,000 pounds of force. The tower held. The cable broke. The towers stayed.

What visitors miss: The mosaic detail at the base of the towers, which most people overlook because they're craning their necks upward. Rodia pressed corn cobs, tools, and even his own hand prints into the wet mortar, and these impressions — intimate, human-scaled, almost childlike — are the counterpoint to the soaring structures above. The towers are ambitious; the handprints are personal; and together they make an argument about art that no gallery has ever made as persuasively: that the urge to build something beautiful is sufficient reason to build it, and that one person, working alone for long enough, can make something that outlasts every institution that tried to tear it down.