“You got to do something they never got ’em in the world,” Simon Rodia once said, per the Los Angeles Times.
Born Sabato Rodia in Italy in 1879, he immigrated at 15, went by Sam, and began building in Los Angeles in 1921, at 42, according to Discover Los Angeles. He filled his three-sided yard in Watts with rebar, concrete, and wire mesh, then covered it with broken Fiesta ware and Bauer ceramics, cast-off Malibu and Batchelder tiles, and stray shells and bottles, the Los Angeles Times reported.
He did it without permits, plans, or machinery, per the Times. Rodia wore a window washer’s belt for safety, skipped the scaffolding, and carried his pieces up in buckets, according to Discover Los Angeles. The result is 17 sculptures, according to its official website, and the tallest tower stands 99.5 feet, per the National Trust for Historic Preservation.
So how long did it take? It was about 33 to 34 years, depending on who you asked. The City of Los Angeles says 34 years, while Cal Parks says 33. In 1955, Rodia deeded the property to a neighbor and hopped on a bus to Northern California to be near his sister’s family, per Discover Los Angeles. He died there in 1965.
Los Angeles was not as charmed. The city ordered the towers demolished in 1957, according to LACMA. On Oct. 10, 1959, engineer Bud Goldstone and a crowd of more than 1,000 watched as a crane pulled on a tower with 10,000 pounds of force. The tower flexed but stayed standing, and the testing equipment failed. Goldstone later ended up with Rodia’s gas fitter pliers.
Thankfully, that initial resentment eventually turned into adoration, or at least some semblance of tolerance from the city government.
The towers are now on the National Register of Historic Places, a National Historic Landmark and a California State Historic Park, and they are Los Angeles Historic-Cultural Monument No. 15, per the city Department of Cultural Affairs. Conservators at LACMA finished stabilizing the three main towers in February 2022, according to the National Trust.
Keeping them up is its own full-time job, and conservator Elisabetta Perfetti told the Times she thinks Rodia would have mixed feelings about it. “Although in my heart I know that we are doing something really amazing, because we are trying to preserve this monument for the future generation, somehow, knowing his personality, I think he wouldn’t completely be okay with it,” she said.
Visitors can see the towers on guided tours, offered Thursday through Saturday. The campus is also in the middle of a renovation, with completion expected in spring 2028. Folk-art fans can pair the trip with Salvation Mountain, one of the stops in a roundup of roadside attractions still worth pulling over for.
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