RonnieAdventure #0028 – Watts Towers and California Sunsets, Los Angeles County, California

I love creative art, so when I learned of the Watts Towers located in the Watts District of Las Angeles; I knew that it was time for a RonnieAdventure!

The Watts Towers are a creation of Sabato Rodia, an Italian immigrant construction worker, and are a good example of non-traditional vernacular architecture combined with American Naïve art. Sabato was a great admirer of Christopher Columbus and he wanted to build a monument in America to honor Columbus, so he labored for a period of 33 years (1921-1954) to build the Watts Towers.

Sabato started his project by locating a triangular shaped lot in Watts. His idea was to build the monument to look like the front half of a sailing vessel with the towers representing the ship’s masts. Since Sabato did not have a lot of capital to invest in the project, he collected any discarded items that he could integrate into his construction project by walking along roads, railroad tracks, and accepting donations of broken items from the neighborhood children.

The towers’ frameworks are combinations of steel pipes and rebar that he bent into the desired shapes by hand, often placing one end of the rebar under a railroad track to increase his leverage. The metal was then fastened together with wire and wrapped with a wire mesh before being covered with cement. Before the cement dried, Sabato embedded all sorts of objects into the wet cement, like broken bottles, sea shells, metal objects and ceramic tiles, and in some places he also used old discarded molds to make surface designs.

Apparently, toward the end of his career Sabato did not get along very well with his neighbors. Rumors circulated that towers were antennae for communicating with enemy forces or aliens, so in 1955 he deeded the property to a neighbor for free and then moved to northern California. He never came back and died a decade later without ever seeing the creation that he had worked so hard on for so many years.

When he left, Sabato had created 17 interconnected structures, two of which reach heights of over 97 feet. The Watts Towers were deeded to the State of California in 1978 and they were designated a National Historic Landmark in 1990. Guided tours of the complex are offered on weekends, or the monument may be viewed from outside of the fence at any time.

As an added bonus, listed below are some California sunset pictures!