Watts Towers survive city test

Oct. 10, 1959: Engineers performed a strength test on the Watts Towers, subjecting Simon Rodia’s spindly sculptures to “a winch-powered cable’s side pull of 10,000 lbs.,” The Times reported.

The towers, constructed over 30 years, “turned out to have been wrought lovingly and well,” moving less than an inch, the newspaper said.

“The test was made because the city had sought to tear down the strange structures” because they were considered a hazard, The Times said. Meanwhile, fans formed a committee to save what “they consider one of the world’s finest works of primitive art.”

“It was as a work of engineering genius, not art, that the towers were tested and they emerged with the complete approval of experts in that field,” The Times reported.

Rodia was not an engineer, but in his copy of the Encyclopedia Britannica, “the pages devoted to structural engineering ... were heavily annotated and showed much concentrated study,” The Times said.