Junk to Pretty

I took the Blue Line with my niece and daughter on a recent Sunday to see the Watts Towers and enjoy the Jazz Festival held there every September.

From a distance, the Towers dominate a flat horizon and command attention with their height. As you get closer, it is the fluid, swirling shapes that beguile. But once inside, colors make the strongest impression.

“The Watts Towers are all about color,” our tour guide tells us, as we stand perched on Simon Rodia’s doorstep. “Here, color is everywhere.”

It’s true. Rodia had a big, bold vision, but he was also a master decorator and a superb colorist. The base color is provided by the concrete skin that covers the bones of steel rod and mesh – it has a light terra cotta hue. This surface is inlaid with brightly colored jewels fashioned from the discards of Rodia’s time – luminous green soda-pop glass; broken pottery in bold blue, orange and red; bits of tile in a palette of soft pastels. The patterns are dense, but artfully arranged and very pleasing to the eye.

We stand in a sunny courtyard crisscrossed by intricate shadows and listen as our guide, Oscar, recites the basics. Simon Rodia was an Italian immigrant, a laborer and a loner. He built the Towers over the course of 34 years – from 1921 to 1955 – and built them alone. He had no training, no plans and no helpers. He employed only the simplest of hand tools and built without rivets, bolts or welds.

“Imagine him as this little Italian guy with a bucket of cement and a bag of broken dishes,” Oscar says.

The Towers rise on an odd, throwaway scrap of land, a triangular, tenth-of-an-acre lot at the end of a cul-de-sac. Rodia’s house used to be there, but only a portion of the front façade remains (the rest of the house was destroyed in a fire many years ago). The three big spires dominate (the tallest is nearly 100 feet). Walls surround the patio which holds a dozen other pieces – including smaller towers and a gazebo.

Oscar beckons us toward the rear wall.

“Look forward,” he says. “What are you standing on?”

The thought seems to cross everyone’s mind at the same instant – it’s a ship! The spires are like three masts, the walls are like bulkheads. But that’s a little too simple. Simon Rodia’s concrete garden is really more complex, a little more elusive than that.



Standing between two of the spires, I look up and notice a heart motif repeated on a series of horizontal support bars. Oscar sees the direction of my stare.

“Yes, it’s a heart pattern,” he says. “It's something he uses many places throughout the garden, although he never said why or what it was about.”

Our time is up and the tour is ending. I would like to stay. There seems so much to take in. This is a rare place in the world, obviously created with great intensity of feeling and imagination. And, yes, color is everywhere.

The line, however, is building for the next tour. It is time to go. We leave through the gate, reluctantly.

Outside, the festival is in full swing. We saunter through tables full of arts and crafts, many of them African-themed, then make our way to the food court. There are picnic tables and umbrellas. We get plates of Haitian food – fish filets and shrimp in a light tomato and garlic sauce, red beans and rice, fried plantains bursting with sweetness – and sit and eat shaded from the sun and serenaded by the percussive rhythms of a drum circle playing just a few feet away.

The sun is high in Watts and there is a slight breeze. It’s a beautiful afternoon in Los Angeles


My daughter is in fourth grade now. She likes it. “School rocks, Dad,” she tells me.

My niece, who grew up in Santa Barbara, has just returned from four years at NYU with a degree in film. She combines a truly sweet and gentle nature with a sharp mind and a remarkable array of talents. One of those talents is a lovely and very versatile singing voice. She can do bel canto and she can do blues. I know she wants to hear the jazz.

We finish eating, return to the big tent near the Towers where center stage sits, and find seats.


The Keschia Potter Quintet is winding up its set. A jazz Wunderkind in her student days, Keschia is a local girl, a graduate of Washington High and UCLA, and now very much a rising jazz star. A slender (even slight) young woman, she knows how to get a big and robust sound out of her alto sax. She and her piano man collaborate on a driving, improvisatory finale, the sequence of chords building in a ladder-like structure, the sinuous saxophone wail winding higher, the piercing high notes resounding like jewels glinting in the sun. The music builds to a triumphant climax, then a final wail, and the crowd roars. Keschia smiles and we all rise to give the band a standing ovation.

I thought about both the musicians and Simon Rodia later, as we made our way home on the Blue Line. It seems that we’re less inclined to ask musicians why or “What’s it all about?” We’re more inclined to accept the beauty in the form of sound as just that – beauty in sound.

While a sophisticated aesthetic (or at least a modernist one) might treat visual arts like sculpture or architecture in a similar way, we’re still inclined to look for associations or symbols in what we see with our eyes. And Rodia’s creation is folk art, not Bauhaus. Part of the allure goes beyond the merely visual. We want to ask, “Why?” Why did he build it? What does it “mean?” What is it about?

Part of the allure of the Watts Towers, then, is mystery – the mystery of Simon Rodia himself.

By all accounts, he was an inarticulate and uncommunicative man, one who left few clues as to what drove him or what he meant to convey with his work.

Some news accounts hint at a hard-drinking past and include quotes from Rodia in which he seems to imply that he embarked on the Towers to keep himself occupied and away from the bottle. But this comes across more like a jest.

Are the Towers meant to represent a ship, as our guide, Oscar, hinted? Perhaps the one that brought Rodia the immigrant to America?

Oscar also brought up something that I had come across previously, in the excellent book on Rodia and the Towers by Bud Goldstone, a key figure in their preservation [The Los Angeles Watts Towers, by Bud Goldstone and Arloa Paquin Goldstone] – the Giglio (Lily) Festival.

The Giglio Festival originates in Nola, a town in Italy's Campania region – the region where Rodia was born and spent his childhood. It is the reenactment of the kidnapping and miraculous escape of Saint Paulinus from North African pirates. The celebration’s centerpiece is a parade of portable towers, six stories high, and the replica of a ship.

Rodia laid out his sculpture garden in a way that resembles the Giglio parade in Nola. Are the Towers a tribute to a childhood memory or simply informed by it?

Accounts of Rodia’s life also hint at a deep emotional wound, the death of a daughter in childhood. Are all the hearts for her?

Rodia never said and so we will never know. Still, it is not hard to imagine him, the “little Italian guy with the bucket of cement and bag of broken dishes,” salvaging steel, bending rods against the train tracks that passed his house, building his Towers one ring at a time, poring over junk, choosing colors carefully, improvising, decorating, in headlong pursuit of an inner vision of beauty.

What pushed him matters less than what he produced. My daughter said it best at the end of the day, when I asked her if she enjoyed the Towers.

“Very much,” she replied. “The man who built them did a good thing. He took junk and made it pretty.”



Watts Towers