True Survivors : Watts Renews Celebration of Its Towers

Adriana Madrigal, 15, sat on her front porch Saturday and watched a racially mixed crowd gathering for a festival at Sabato (Sam) Rodia’s Watts Towers across the street. Although her family has lived there for three years, Adriana got her first full view of the towers earlier this month as the scaffolding from a seven-year restoration was dismantled.

“They’re really sensational,” she said. “We see tours coming by every day. Talking to the people, you find that they come from different lands just to look at this: Germany, France, all over Europe and the United States. The world comes to our doorstep.”

Intense Passion

The towers are the product of an intense, sustained passion, and the tallest thrusts nearly 100 feet above the triangular lot where they have stood since 1954. Despite being internationally acclaimed, Rodia’s towers have been largely ignored by the deep-pocketed mavens of Los Angeles’ cultural Establishment.

They have been threatened by bureaucratic indifference, the ravages of weather and vandals and a city government order that they be ripped down. But still they stand, in the words of John Outterbridge, director of the Watts Towers Art Center, “as a symbol of struggle, just as the Watts community has struggled over the years.”

“I had in mind to do something big,” Rodia, an Italian immigrant, said of the 33 years he devoted to building the towers. “And I did.”

Scaffolding cloaked his structures while the state-financed $1.2-million restoration job was being completed. But the wraps have come off, and the Towers at 1727 East 107th St. were reintroduced Saturday to thousands of Southern Californians who turned out to celebrate the 9th Annual Simon Rodia Watts Towers Music and Arts Festival. (Rodia was incorrectly identified as “Simon” in a 1939 Times article, and the name has stuck ever since.)

Setting the Tempo

Although temperatures soared toward the 90s, hundreds of spectators relaxed beneath huge awnings as they listened to a jazz band set the tempo for the two-day festival.

Others sampled ethnic food or browsed among scores of booths selling everything from imported African art to classic blues recordings. Dozens more ambled leisurely through the art center where photographer Cecil Fergerson’s exhibit, “Watts: the Hub,” documented the area’s early history, and, Fergerson said, the “positive energy that has flowed from this community since the 1965 rebellion.”

But the real star of the festival, sponsored by the city’s Cultural Affairs Department and Salem cigarettes, were the towers themselves.

“What we’re seeing is outstanding,” said Ralph Stowell who, with his wife, Mary, had traveled up from Long Beach for their first look at the towers.

Thrilled at First Look

“It’s just magnificent, marvelous, unbelievable what he did all by himself,” said Florence Sato. She had gone to Watts from Monterey Park to see the towers for the first time because a friend had told her that “every time she came, she saw something new, something different.”

Klaus-Guenther Grohmann, cultural attache at the West German Consulate in Los Angeles, described the towers as a “very, very good architectural monument and cultural site. He (Rodia) really did great work.” West Germany contributed $2,000 to sponsor a musical group and a singer performing at the festival.

Outterbridge called the towers’ reopening “exciting and unnerving at the same time in that they are an international celebrity. They’re the cultural ambassador for the West Coast that happens to sit in South-Central Los Angeles.”

As much as the festival crowd enjoyed the music, exhibits and the towers themselves, Ann Luke, who co-chairs the nonprofit Committee for the Simon Rodia Towers, cautioned them that “there’s much more restoration and maintenance to be done.”

Need for Financing

Maintaining the structures will require a City Council appropriation of $150,000 a year for the next five years and $75,000 a year after that, said Fred Croton, general manager of the city’s Cultural Affairs Department.

“My expectation is that this is going to happen,” he said.

Getting funds from the arts Establishment “is going to be tough, real tough,” a leading officer in charge of corporate contributions has said. While nearly everyone agrees that the towers deserve restoration, attorney Richard Sherwood has pointed out that one problem is that they are “not in the middle of everyone’s traffic pattern. Now if the towers were on Wilshire Boulevard. . . .”

The state took over the restoration in 1980, after having been deeded the site by the city, which retained administrative control.

Cosmic thinker Buckminster Fuller, designer of the geodesic dome, said the “superb” structures reinforced his belief in “intuitive intelligence and in the dynamics of genius. Almost all great design is first intuitive design. Rodia was a master of his material.”

The untrained and probably illiterate genius who executed this design was born in an Italian village 20 miles east of Naples in 1875, according to his relatives. He immigrated to the United States when he was about 12, and spent several years in Pennsylvania before moving to Seattle, where he married in 1902.

A year later he moved to the Bay Area near Oakland, working as a cement mason for the City of Oakland, and later on construction gangs rebuilding San Francisco after the 1906 earthquake.

He also started drinking, so much so that his wife gathered up their two sons and walked away in 1909. To his brother-in-law, Rodia was a “drunken bum,” a “Gypsy” who should be written off as “no damned good.”

Rodia, however, surfaced sober and hard-working in Long Beach in 1918, living with a woman who also would leave him. In the 1920s he moved to Watts with yet another woman, who was to ultimately take him for all of his money before she, too, disappeared.

A California Amalgam

Rodia washed his hands of women and turned his energies toward realizing his vision of doing “something big.” The Watts of the 1920s, when Rodia bought the lot where his towers now stand, was a slow-paced, semi-rural amalgam of whites, Latinos, blacks and Japanese--a port of entry for immigrants, foreign and domestic, then flocking to Southern California.

As he began building in 1921, Rodia collected colored bottles, sea shells, tiles, bits of glass--materials as disparate as Watts’ population--and brought them together in artistic harmony in what he was to call “Nuestro Pueblo,” Spanish for “Our Town.”

Obsessed with his vision, Rodia spent every spare moment--and every spare dime--from his construction job to build the towers.

“One week I buy cement, next week I buy iron,” he told an interviewer. “Every week I use up all my money, buy things to keep working, keep working.”

Stability Assured

Such was his confidence in the stability of his construction that he ignored neighbors’ advice to come down from a tower where he was working during the 1933 Long Beach earthquake.

“It won’t fall,” he reassured them, and it didn’t.

Working without cranes, scaffolds or assistants, Rodia told an interviewer in the 1950s: “I had no help. I couldn’t tell no one what to do because a million times I didn’t know what to do myself.”

Guided only by his intuitive genius, Rodia punctuated the towers and their surrounding walls with eccentric accents--a tea kettle embedded into a wall here, a cowboy boot there.

As the towers neared completion, the driven man--who once sang and listened to Enrico Caruso’s recordings on a gramophone while working--had drawn more into himself. Relatives said he bathed only once a month, and then only with alcohol.

Just as three women had walked away from him in his lifetime, Rodia, nearly 80, turned his back on his spiraling, graceful ladies when the work was completed and moved to Martinez, north of Berkeley, never to see his masterwork again.

A young film maker, William Cartwright, and his friend, actor Nicholas King, had bought the towers for $3,000 in 1959, and while at City Hall to get a building permit for a caretaker’s home on the site, they discovered a two-year-old demolition order. Bureaucrats had concluded that the towers did not meet building codes.

The owners rallied their friends to fight City Hall and formed the Committee for the Simon Rodia Towers. The city designed a stress test to simulate a 72-m.p.h. gale, attaching cables to one structure to see if it would topple.

The Battle Won

The late art historian Kate Steinitz called the test “a barbaric measure comparable to a witch trial in the Middle Ages.” But the towers were equal to the barbarism, and a city engineer took down the demolition order and handed it to a member of the group organized to save the towers.

About the same time, the towers began attracting international attention as a unique, albeit unorthodox, art form.

Rodia enjoyed a measure of fame as his towers attracted more and more attention. Even his brother-in-law welcomed him back to the fold when world-renowned art experts began calling him a genius. Eleven years after leaving Watts, he died at 90 in a nursing home, tied to a bed to prevent him from walking away.

The festival celebrating both his genius and the surrounding community continues today with continuous music by rhythm and blues, jazz and gospel groups from 10 a.m. until 6 p.m.

Tax deductible contributions to complete the restoration and develop the site are being collected by the Watts Towers Community Trust, in care of the California Community Foundation, 1151 West 6th St., Los Angeles 90017.