Watts Towers: Latest Goal Is to Save Creator’s Details

Sam Rodia worked with the simplest of tools to put up his triangular construction known as Watts Towers. A small man, barely 5 feet tall, Rodia clung to the climbing rungs with an iron hook and a window-washer’s belt, the rhythm of the rungs determined by the reach of his short arms.

Using pliers, a hammer and wire clippers, the unschooled Italian immigrant spent more than 30 years constructing what critics now regard as an act of visionary architecture. Never mind that Rodia’s masterpiece is made of broken bottles, pottery shards, seashells and bits of iron--or that it’s held together by chicken wire smeared with ordinary builder’s cement.

Develop a Plan

Never mind, unless you are conservation expert Rosa Lowinger, 32, whose job it is to develop a plan for the long-term preservation of Rodia’s fragile towers. With her assistant, Caitlin Horowitz; site supervisor Zuleyma Whitehurst, and project consultant Bud Goldstone, Lowinger is attempting to solve many problems that have hindered previous efforts to preserve Rodia’s world-famous legacy.

Viewing the project for the first time last year, Lowinger says frankly that she “was overwhelmed. The towers are such an unusual art object; they have suffered so much neglect; they have so many variables in terms of the wide variety of materials Rodia used to construct and decorate them that I was stunned by the immensity of the task.”

However, it wasn’t long before she discovered the root of the problems--the way the towers are built.

Delicate Strength

A construction worker with no real training as a builder, Rodia worked part time on the project, beginning in the early 1920s. “He had no technical advice when he erected his towers, the tallest of which is almost 100 feet high,” said Lowinger, who specializes in the restoration of large-scale sculptures.

Even so, the structural strength of the delicate towers is remarkable.

In his book, “The Ascent of Man,” Joseph Bronowski writes of Rodia’s work: “It’s a monument in the 20th Century to take us back to the simple, happy and fundamental skill from which all our knowledge of the laws of mechanics grows.”

The late Buckminster Fuller ranked Rodia on a par with himself as a “natural engineering sculptor” free of the prejudices of formal training. “Rodia thought in terms of nature producing a palm tree,” Fuller said. “He asked himself--how can that great palm be up there waving in the wind and not break down?”

In fact, the artwork’s greatest enemy has been official neglect. Since Rodia walked away from the constructions he called “Nuestro Pueblo” (Our Town) in 1954 to join his sister and other relatives in the Bay Area city of Martinez, the City of Los Angeles has alternately attempted to demolish the towers, ignore them, carry out a botched conservation effort, and hand ownership over to the state of California.

In 1975, the state agreed to lease the towers back to Los Angeles for 50 years.

Finally, in 1985, bowing to public pressure and a lawsuit filed by the Committee for Simon Rodia’s Towers in Watts, the City Council allocated $800,000 for a five-year restoration program.

Protection Plan

A plan for protecting and preserving Rodia’s fantasia was announced later that year at a symposium sponsored by the city’s Cultural Affairs Department, which has jurisdiction over the towers.

Security was the first priority. To protect the work, a steel fence has been put up around the site’s perimeter, a team of guards patrols day and night and floodlights bathe the towers in a soft glow after dark.

The second priority--and a vital conservation tool--is creating a computerized record of the towers’ many details. Additionally, noted architectural photographer Marvin Rand has produced an extensive series of shots that will, when completed later this year, give a comprehensive picture of the condition of the work.

The third phase is the long-term preservation program being developed by Lowinger, Horowitz, Whitehurst and consultant Goldstone.

“There are a million problems,” Horowitz said. “The state carried out a $1.2-million conservation program between 1979 and ’85 that mainly strengthened the towers’ steel reinforcement. But we have to now find the most up-to-date yet simplest means to repair the damage to the decorative elements, and develop a recipe book for the towers’ future care.”

Heal the Cracks

The Watts Towers Conservation Handbook, as the “recipe book” is more formally titled, will recommend ways to reattach fallen bits of glass, tile and sea shells, provide a list of adhesion materials to heal the multiple cracks in cement sinews and offer methods of halting erosion due to weather, pollution and time.

The towers, at 1765 East 107th St., are vulnerable to a variety of conditions, said Goldstone, an engineer. “The cracks open and close during the course of a day as the air heats up, then cools. The structural legs sway in the wind. If you climb to the top of the tallest tower, as I often have over the past 40 years, you can feel the whole thing breathe and tremble constantly.”

How long before the towers crumble into dust?

Lowinger ponders the question but evades an answer. Because the conservation effort is accompanied by so many variables, it is difficult to predict whether Watts Towers will ever achieve a basic level of preservation requiring only steady maintenance, she said.

Jumping in where conservationists fear to tread, engineer Goldstone added: “They’ll be up as long as there’s cash to preserve and protect them. If the city will fulfill its long-term legal obligation to fund the preservation program in perpetuity, the towers will last forever.”

Committed to Care

Al Nodal, general manager of the Cultural Affairs Department, said Los Angeles is committed to “caring for the towers for as long as it takes.”

And, indeed, the preservation effort could take a long time because many elements of this complex work are in need of repair.

The so-called “Ship of Marco Polo” at the prow of the triangular complex is cracked; its tiled pinnacle, tilted by the 1987 Whittier quake, is temporarily propped.

At the other end of the site next to the burned-out shell of Rodia’s cottage, a circular gazebo is in disrepair. Iron reinforcing bars are rusted and exposed and many tile ornaments have fallen off.

Large cracks threaten the stability of the structural legs of the 55-foot-high east tower, the smallest of the three main spires that make up Rodia’s composition.

All through “Nuestro Pueblo,” bits of tile, strings of sea shells and friezes of bottle bottoms are smashed or have fallen out of place.

Preservation Questions

Having surveyed all this, Lowinger now questions whether preservationists should attempt to restore the work to its pristine glory of 35 years ago, when Rodia completed the project.

“There’s no point in trying to second-guess Rodia,” she observed. “I believe you strike a balance between an over-scrupulous restoration of the original and an acknowledgment of what the last decades have wrought.”

Because Rodia drew no plans, records are spotty, and reliable photos are scarce, “You have to resist the temptation to create your own Watts Towers,” she said.

Meanwhile, visits by guests are limited due to the towers’ fragility. Currently, public tours are conducted only on Saturdays. For more information, call (213) 485-2433.