LOS ANGELES — On a residential block in Watts, past bungalows and chain-link fences, a cluster of spires punches nearly 100 feet into the Southern California haze. Steel rebar, wire mesh and mortar, studded with broken bottles, seashells, tile shards and thousands of pieces of found glass that catch the afternoon light. No blueprint. There never was one.
The Watts Towers were built almost entirely by one man working alone, no scaffolding, no engineering degree, no crew. Simon Rodia, an Italian immigrant tile setter and construction worker, spent more than three decades raising the towers on his residential lot, starting around 1921 and working mostly nights and weekends until 1954. He called the site "Nuestro Pueblo." Spanish for "our town."
Rodia never explained exactly why he built them. Few interviews, no grand statement of purpose, though he was known to say he wanted to do something big. When he finished, he deeded the property to a neighbor, left Watts, moved north, and reportedly never returned before his death in 1965. What he left behind became one of the most improbable works of folk art in the country, and arguably the most important structure ever built by a single, unpaid, self-taught hand in California.
The towers are not one structure but a complex of 17 interconnected pieces: spires, walls, a fountain and a gazebo-like structure sometimes called the ship of Marco Polo, a nod to Rodia's pride in his Italian seafaring heritage. He built without power tools, bending rebar by hand and climbing his own structures using a window washer's belt-and-buckle system he improvised himself. He mixed his own mortar and pressed in whatever he could find or was given: pieces of Bauer pottery, 7-Up bottle glass, tile fragments, corn cobs pushed into wet cement to leave decorative impressions, then pulled out.
None of it followed conventional construction standards, which is precisely what almost got the whole thing knocked down. After Rodia left, the city of Los Angeles tagged the site a safety hazard and moved in the late 1950s to demolish the towers. Local residents and preservationists pushed back hard and demanded a stress test instead. In a piece of L.A. lore now practically worn smooth from retelling, engineers hooked cables to a crane and yanked on one of the towers with thousands of pounds of force, publicly, expecting it to fail. The crane strained. The tower did not move. The city relented.
That standoff became foundational to how Angelenos think about the towers: not just as an art object, but as a monument to a community that refused to let outsiders tear something down. Watts in the years since has carried a complicated public identity, shaped nationally by the 1965 uprising that followed the arrest of a Black motorist and drew attention to poverty and policing in the neighborhood. The towers predate all of that and have outlasted it, a marker of the neighborhood's identity that exists outside the narratives imposed on it from outside.
Ownership changed hands several times after Rodia left. The city eventually took over stewardship, and the towers were later designated a National Historic Landmark and listed on the National Register of Historic Places. They are now overseen through a partnership involving the city's cultural affairs department and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, which has supported conservation efforts at the site for years. Restoration is a continual, painstaking process. The mortar Rodia hand-mixed a century ago is failing in places the way all century-old material eventually does, and conservators have had to develop specialized techniques to stabilize the structures without sanding away the imperfect, handmade character that makes them what they are.
A cultural center and gallery space next to the towers hosts community arts programming, workshops and exhibitions, carrying Rodia's improvisational, materials-at-hand spirit into ongoing local arts education. For decades the annual Simon Rodia Watts Towers Jazz and Arts Festival has drawn musicians and visitors to the site, part concert, part civic celebration of a neighborhood too often reduced in outside coverage to crime statistics and footage of unrest.
What makes the towers endure as a piece of California identity is not just their scale or strangeness, but what they say about who gets to make art and where. Rodia had no formal training, no wealthy patrons, no institutional backing. He built with construction scraps and the patience of a man convinced that something worth doing was worth doing slowly, alone, with no obligation to explain himself to anyone.
Nearly a century after he began, the towers are still standing on the same residential lot, framed by power lines and modest houses, visible from blocks away to anyone driving through Watts. They were never meant to be a tourist landmark. They became one anyway, built by a man who wanted, in his own words, to do something big, and did.
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