Watts Towers: The Load Test That Saved Them, California

Sabato “Simon” Rodia came to the United States from Italy as a teenager in 1895 and worked construction and tile jobs. In 1921, on a small triangular lot in Watts, he started building something nobody had asked for. For 33 years, mostly by himself, he bent steel rebar using railroad tracks as a vise, wrapped it in wire mesh and coated it in his own concrete mix. Into the wet surface he pressed broken dishes, tile, colored bottle glass and seashells. He used only hand tools, no special equipment and no set plans. By 1954 there were 17 connected structures, and the tallest tower reached 99.5 feet. In 1955, Rodia gave the property to a neighbor and moved north to Martinez, California. He never returned. After a 1956 fire burned his small house, the city condemned the towers and ordered them destroyed. In 1959, actor Nicholas King and film editor William Cartwright bought the property to save it. They and their supporters challenged the city to a test. On October 10, 1959, engineers applied up to 10,000 pounds of lateral force to the towers. The towers held, and the demolition was called off. The Committee for Simon Rodia’s Towers in Watts cared for them for years. In 1990 they became a National Historic Landmark. Today the Watts Towers are a state historic park, and they came through the 1994 Northridge earthquake with only a few pieces shaken loose.