Watts Towers are seventeen structures created in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles by Simon Rodia, a self-taught laborer from Italy who began the project in 1921 and worked on it alone during evenings, weekends, and holidays for the next 34 years. Born Sabato Rodia on February 12, 1879, in Ribottoli, Italy, he likely drew inspiration from the Gigli Festival in nearby Nola, whose tall ceremonial towers closely resemble his work. After years as a coal miner and traveling construction worker, and after a marriage and family life that ended in divorce in 1912, Rodia bought a house on a triangle-shaped lot in Watts and at age 42 began building the structures he later named Nuestro Pueblo. Using pique assiette mosaic methods, cement, wire mesh, steel, recycled materials, and more than 150 flying buttresses, he decorated the towers with about 100,000 fragments including pottery shards, seashells, colored glass, glazed tiles, broken china, mirrors, rocks, and other discarded objects. Rodia stopped work in 1954, left Watts, deeded the property to his neighbor Louis Sauceda, and died in 1965 without seeing the towers again. After vandalism, a fire, and a demolition order, preservationists William Cartwright and Nicholas King acquired the property, organized the Committee for Simon Rodia’s Towers in Watts, and saved the towers after the tallest one withstood a stress test of 10,000 pounds. The towers became a Los Angeles Historic Cultural Monument in 1963, passed into public ownership in 1975, became Watts Towers of Simon Rodia State Historic Park, received National Historic Landmark status in 1990, and continue to require ongoing conservation to repair cracks and reattach ornamentation.
