Towering Frustration : Many in Watts Wonder When Long-Delayed Renewal Will Be Done

Ten years ago, the Watts Towers were closed to the public for emergency repairs.

The lacy spires were cracked. The seashells, colored glass and pottery that dance across the towers in fanciful mosaics were crumbling. Experts concluded that something drastic had to be done before somebody got hit by a flying chunk of the huge artwork.

It turned out to be no temporary emergency.

The towers have spent most of the last decade buried under scaffolding. Architects, artisans, tile workers, and, for a brief time, even motorcycle gang members recruited at a nearby liquor store, have tried to patch the towers.

$1.2 Million Spent

The face-lift wound up costing more than $1 million, and more bills are coming in.

Yet the towers--which have inspired awe, intrigue and bickering over the decades--remain a safety hazard. The spindly legs are still cracking and the artwork continues to shed its bric-a-brac.

A fence keeps the public out. Only school groups and people who attend the occasional music festivals held on the grounds are permitted peeks inside. For the rest, who drop by from places such as Germany, New Zealand and Africa, the pilgrimage is akin to going to a birthday party without eating cake: all they can see are the tops of the towers.

No one knows just how long it will take to finish the restoration. But Los Angeles officials, who ordered the towers closed in March, 1978, now hope that the creation of the late Sam Rodia will reopen in two years.

Current State of Affairs

Myrna Saxe, the towers’ latest conservator, summed up the current state of affairs this way:

“Everyone is working as fast as they can,” she said. But “it’s not as fast as it’s falling apart.”

The delays have exasperated some art aficionados, who suspect that the cement wonderland tucked along a dead-end street would have been completely restored by now if it had a Beverly Hills address.

“Why is the damn thing taking so long?” asked Seymour Rosen, the head of Saving and Preserving Arts and Cultural Environments, or SPACES, a national folk art organization based in Los Angeles. “There is absolutely no reason it should take 10 years.”

But many reasons are offered.

The project got off to a bad start in 1978 when a contractor botched the job, triggering complaints from tower supporters that motorcycle gang members had been hired to scramble up the structures, doing more harm than good. When reconstruction experts later labored in Rodia’s yard, however, they found it would be naive to talk of easy fixes.

The state sank $1.2 million into the restoration from 1979 to 1985, but even as the work progressed, cracks reappeared on the three tall towers, which resemble stacked spider webs. The intricate work of art has continued to self-destruct--some cracks are up to 7 feet long--and nobody, to this day, really understands why.

Complicating matters is the uneasy alliance between art lovers with predominantly Westside zip codes and the towers’ neighbors. In a sometimes tortuous process, the art lovers learned that the tower and the surrounding impoverished community are a package deal. Fix one, help the other.

The latest citizens’ group formed to help, the Watts Towers Community and Conservation Trust, is now in jeopardy of falling apart after devoting most of the time since its creation in 1985 trying to determine what the community wants.

During a slow, painful getting-acquainted period, about half the blue-ribbon panel dropped out, including Richard Koshalek, director of the Museum of Contemporary Art.

At this point, it is uncertain whether the trust--which was being counted on to raise funds to augment the city’s effort--will disintegrate or reorganize.

“Essentially they misunderstood one another,” said Leon Whiteson, an architecture critic and former head of the trust. “The Westside arts community didn’t understand the Watts community and vice versa. How could they? Their experiences are so polar.”

Committee members with roots in South-Central Los Angeles saw the towers as a symbol of Watts residents’ struggle against poverty and crime. For them, it would be unconscionable to fix the towers and ignore the surroundings.

They wanted to convert the vacant land around the towers into a cultural oasis with an auditorium, visitors’ center, art studios and a park. But other committee members thought the added fund-raising chore would only make saving the towers more difficult.

The trust’s problems have dismayed the towers’ staunchest admirers.

“One has to be extremely anxious about their future,” said Robert Rees, assistant dean of UCLA’s College of Fine Arts, who has delved into the towers’ history for a television documentary. “History tells us to be pessimistic. . . . We’ve gotten this far by the skin of our teeth.”

‘It’s a Sad Thing’

“It’s been 10 years,” lamented Grace Payne, executive director of the Westminister Neighborhood Assn. in Watts. “It’s a sad thing with the committee they formed and all the things they talked about doing. Nothing has been done.”

The towers have experienced many setbacks since Rodia, after spending 33 years creating his back yard fantasy by hand, abruptly gave his property in 1954 to a neighbor and moved to Northern California. The towers were passed on to a would-be taco-stand operator and later condemned by the city after Rodia’s house burned and the property became a dumping ground.

Back then, negotiations to save the towers seemed hopeless when a hard-nosed city bureaucrat said the Leaning Tower of Pisa would have been torn down too if it had dared to tilt in Los Angeles. But a young aerospace engineer, Bud Goldstone, arranged a safety test that showed the towers could withstand a 10,000-pound load.

The landmark was purchased in 1959 by a group of artists, photographers and film makers called the Committee for Simon Rodia’s Towers in Watts (like many, they got Rodia’s first name wrong based on early news reports, which the artist, typically, did not bother to correct). But their passion for the towers did not stop them from arguing passionately among themselves. Tiring of the burden, the group deeded the land to the city in 1975 after extracting promises that the towers would be well cared for.

But the group soon regretted its move. On its behalf, the Center for Law in the Public Interest filed suit in 1978, alleging that the city’s contractor had embarked on a “savage restoration.”

State Intercedes

While the suit was being fought, the state interceded. In return for a $1.2-million donation, the state got title to the land in 1978, then leased it back to the city for 50 years.

When the state-financed work on the towers ended in 1985, the job was far from finished. Only the three most prominent towers had been spruced up. The smaller spires, the cement scrollwork and the skeleton of Rodia’s house continued to deteriorate.

Then it was the city’s turn to pay.

In an agreement settling the lawsuit, the city in 1985 agreed to spend $800,000 on the towers. It paid another $50,000 to the newly created Watts Towers Community and Conservation Trust, earmarked as seed money that would help the group raise millions of dollars more for the project.

Hoping to dispel any ill will lingering from the lawsuit, the city asked Goldstone, one of the towers’ more loyal supporters, to be its chief consultant for the project. He was joined by Saxe, whose conservation credits include work on the Hearst Castle, the Pasadena City Hall and the Griffith Park Observatory.

Although feeling pressure to finish from City Council members, Saxe expects it will take another year merely to figure out what long-term measures are needed. It is important not to repeat past mistakes, she said, meaning that additional restoration should not start until the cause of cracking is pinpointed.

Cosmetic Repairs

“Cosmetic repairs that get (the public) in sooner don’t preserve it for the next generation,” Saxe said.

Prying secrets from a monument that defies explanations has required extensive work. Data has been collected in a computer that can spit out the specifics of 2,900 repairs completed since 1979. A photographer has snapped hundreds of photographs of the artwork from top to bottom. Recently, a team of engineers even took its vital signs: the temperature of one of the towers, its minute movements and its strain under the weight of concrete.

Meanwhile, the team is like a fire crew responding to one brush fire after another. When a piece of a tower or the gazebo or a fountain crumbles or falls, it is held in place with splints or other means until it can be fixed permanently. For instance, part of the mast of the artwork’s Marco Polo ship, which forms the base of one of the smaller towers, is kept in place by yellow mesh wrapping.

What appears to be a trickier job is keeping the towers’ friends from giving up.

Problems within the Watts Towers Community and Conservation Trust emerged as soon as trust members began discussing their priorities. For some, the location of the towers, which have been called Los Angeles’ Parthenon, was irrelevant. It would not have mattered if the towers were perched on Mt. Wilson or hemmed in by cookie shops in Westwood; their chief interest was preserving them.

But John Outterbridge, an artist and director of the Watts Towers Arts Center, was among a group of community members who insisted that the committee’s mandate was to enhance the cultural life of those who live in the towers’ shadows.

Ambitious Requests

Although no one ever came up with a price tag for a bigger arts center, artist studios, an auditorium and other projects on the ambitious wish list, the community members won that philosophical debate.

Interest waned, however, as meetings became bogged down in discussions of Watts’ social morass. Meanwhile, fund raising fizzled amid complaints of poor management under a director who had no experience in nonprofit organizations. Potential corporate contributors were further frightened off by the trust’s lack of direction.

“We agree with the community (that) it is a symbol for Watts and it should be saved,” said Jack Shakley, president of the California Community Foundation, who resigned from the trust. “We want to be helpful, but there needs to be a plan and right now there isn’t any plan.”

Robert Harris, the dean of USC’s School of Architecture and a committee member, wants to salvage the trust, perhaps with more Watts residents as members and the outside professionals serving merely as advisers. He sees the group keeping a “sharp eye” on the work to keep the city conscientious.

City Stops Giving

But as far as the city is concerned, the trust is dead. After giving it $50,000, the city has refused further donations.

“We’re not here to pour money down an unproductive rat hole,” Rodney Punt, general manager of the city’s Cultural Affairs Department, said tersely.

Even so, he agrees with other tower supporters that Los Angeles’ most famous artwork needs an organized group of friends.

“There must be some fund-raising group like the trust,” Goldstone said. “There is no way public funds will be available to support the Watts Tower conservation for the next 100 years.”