Attempts to Save Spires Have Nearly Been Their Undoing : Restoration: Once, a cable tied to the tallest tower was pulled by a truck to prove that it was safe. Another time, members of a motorcycle gang hired to repair it tore off some adornments.

While art critics throughout the world have rhapsodized about the Watts Towers, Los Angeles has a long tradition of abusing, neglecting and attempting to destroy its greatest art monument.

In 1954, after 33 years of work on his grand obsession, Sabato Rodia turned the property over to a neighbor and moved to Northern California to live near relatives. The neighbor ended up selling the property to a man who wanted to use the towers as the setting for a taco stand.

But the towers were spared that indignity when the city condemned the property. Harold Manley, head of the Building and Safety Department, wrote in a 1959 memo: “Personally, I think this is the biggest pile of junk outside a junkyard that I have ever seen.”

City bureaucrats claimed that the towers were unsafe and had to be demolished. But a young aerospace engineer, Bud Goldstone, designed a stress test to simulate a 75-m.p.h. wind to prove that the towers were not a hazard. He attached cables from the tallest tower to a truck across the street and gradually increased the pressure on the cables.

In the rarefied, refined world of art, critics were outraged and lambasted the city of Los Angeles for subjecting the artwork to such a risky ordeal. Art historian Kate Steinitz called the test “a barbaric measure comparable to a witch trial in the Middle Ages. . . . If something is cracked on a Greek vase, would you throw it to the ground to see if it broke?”

The towers withstood the test, and the city sold the towers to an organization dedicated to their preservation. But the group had difficulty raising funds to maintain the towers, largely because they never became a fashionable cause among the city’s art cognoscenti.

The preservation group became discouraged and deeded the land to the city in 1975, after officials promised that the towers would be cared for. But the group soon regretted this decision.

In 1978, the city’s Board of Public Works awarded an almost $200,000 renovation contract to a local architect. The architect later testified that the chairman of the board asked him to leave $9,500 in $20 bills--what he called “consulting fees”--in his home mailbox. The district attorney’s office later learned of the fees during a probe of the board, but no criminal charges were filed.

The architect testified that he recruited workers at a Watts liquor store by asking the owner: “You got some dudes around here looking for a little work?” About 10 workers were hired, some of whom were in a motorcycle gang.

They scrambled up the towers, armed with putty knives and hammers, and “tore off anything that was loose,” Goldstone recalled. They did so much damage that work was halted after only one day.

A public interest law firm filed suit on behalf of the preservation group, alleging that the city’s contractor had embarked on a “savage restoration.” While the suit was being fought, the state interceded and launched a restoration effort. The state obtained title to the land, then leased it back to the city for 50 years.