Towers of Turmoil

Watts Towers is surely Los Angeles’ most beloved and cursed monument. When it comes to cultural treasures that bring out the highest of passions and the lowest of actions, there’s just no competition for the mosaic-covered wonderland built by an unschooled Italian immigrant known as Simon Rodia.

Widely acclaimed as a folk art masterpiece and a symbol of human ingenuity, the walled complex of lacy spires and sculptural forms is officially designated a city, state and national historic monument. Yet it has endured a litany of indignities ranging from a 10,000-pound stress test--conducted by supporters in 1959 to prove that it wasn’t a public hazard--to vandalism, inept restoration, political corruption, bureaucratic indifference and natural disasters.

The last of those, the 1994 Northridge earthquake, cracked the concrete casing on the towers. The cracks in turn exposed rust and other problems in the steel structure, which had to be fixed before the surfaces were repaired. As a result, the towers have been closed and obscured by scaffolding for seven years.

“It’s been too long,” says Mark Greenfield, giving voice to widespread frustration. As director of the Watts Towers Arts Center, a city-operated exhibition and education facility next to the monument, Greenfield is besieged with questions about the towers from local devotees and tourists who travel great distances to see them.

But now seismic restoration--a $1.9-million job funded by the Federal Emergency Management Agency--is finished and Watts Towers is set to reopen. A really big party is brewing, in the form of a weekend celebration Sept. 28 to 30, and a really big crowd is likely to be there.

“It’s going to be very exciting when we officially reopen the towers because we’re in a different era now,” says Rosalind Goddard, president of the Friends of the Watts Towers Arts Center, a nonprofit support group that has raised about $30,000 for the weekend event. “Despite Los Angeles’ infamous geography, where everything is so spread out and we have so many separate communities, there are people nowadays who just go anywhere to good things. This will give them an opportunity to commemorate the towers, to share in the history of Simon Rodia and to see this as a wonderful place to visit.”

The program will begin with an official reopening and tower-lighting ceremony Sept. 28 at 7:30 p.m. The following two days will be benchmark occasions for two community festivals: the 20th annual Day of the Drum Festival on Sept. 29 and the 25th annual Simon Rodia Watts Towers Jazz Festival on Sept. 30.

Many community groups will take part in the Sept. 28 program, says Goddard, who is looking forward to a rich mixture of performances including dance, music and poetry, in the amphitheater next to the towers. The schedule will feature performers affiliated with Concerned Artists Action, Watts Towers Community Action Council, Watts Century Latino Organization, Watts Prophets and Watts Prophets Community Education Assn.

A contingent from Italy will also participate. With the help of the Italian government and various Italian American groups, about 50 performers from the region of Campagnia around Serino, Italy, where Rodia was born, will travel to Los Angeles. A group of Neapolitan classical singers will perform on Sept. 28. A company of folk dancers will appear in the Day of the Drum Festival.

“We are covering all the bases,” Goddard says. That includes acknowledging members of Rodia’s family and stalwart supporters of the towers, showing a clip from a documentary film-in-progress by Ed Landler, and cutting a cake that replicates the towers.

But even amid the festivities, the towers’ future remains in question. The work of keeping them in shape is never finished, and the Watts Towers curse hasn’t been completely dispelled. At a Los Angeles Cultural Heritage Commission meeting earlier this month, the towers’ fate was once again on the agenda: Who is really responsible for Rodia’s visionary confection, and who will foot the bills?

The hoopla that will accompany the towers’ reopening next week would probably amaze Rodia. He walked away from his masterpiece in 1954--after 33 years of creatively inspired labor--deeded the property to a neighbor and never returned. He moved to Northern California, rented a room in a boardinghouse in Martinez and died in 1965. He was honored in 1961 at a program in the Bay Area, and interviewed by reporters and filmmakers over the years. But accounts of his life and work frequently conflict, partly because his English could be difficult to understand and his comments inconsistent.

“I had in my mind to do something big, and I did,” the wiry, 4-foot-11 artist told one interviewer. That’s about as close as he got to explaining his motivation and methods.

Even Rodia’s name is a source of confusion. Born Sabato Rodia on Feb. 12, 1879, in Ribottoli, a village just south of Serino and about 20 miles east of Naples, he sailed to America when he was about 15 and joined his older brother, Ricardo, who had settled in Pennsylvania and worked in a coal mine. Within a few years, Sabato adopted the nickname Sam and worked his way across the country, supporting himself as a laborer. The name Simon seems to have started with a mistake in a Times article in 1937; it stuck from then on.

During his life as “Sam,” Rodia moved to Seattle around 1900 and married Lucia Ucci in 1902. Their first son, Francesco, was born in 1903; the second, Alfred, arrived two years later, after they had moved to Oakland. The marriage ended in 1912. By then, Rodia was living in El Paso. At age 38, he married a 16-year-old Mexican woman, Benita. They soon moved to Long Beach, where he launched his creative enterprise by building sculptures in his yard, including a stationary merry-go-round.

Rodia’s second marriage lasted only about three years, and his third, to a Mexican immigrant named Carmen, was even shorter. She left in 1921, soon after he bought the narrow, triangular lot at 1765 E. 107th St. and began to build the towers. Apparently, he was not an easy man to live with. Writers who have interviewed Rodia’s associates and family members to patch together his biography say he was cantankerous and tempestuous, drank too much and bathed about once a month--with an alcohol rub.

By day, Rodia was a cement finisher and construction worker. At night and on weekends, he built a structure of rebar and scrap steel, lashing the pieces together with wire and wrapping them in wire mesh. He coated the metal skeleton with concrete and decorated the surfaces with glazed tiles, broken pottery, seashells and shards of colored glass bottles.

Over 33 years, Rodia erected 17 structures on his property. Along with the trademark spires--the tallest of which rises nearly 100 feet--there are scalloped walls, planters, fountains, a fish pond, a ship-like structure and a gazebo. His house burned down the year after he left, but the remaining entry has a canopy decorated with a menagerie of tiny ceramic sculptures, and a doorway bordered by tiles and broken mirrors.

By then, Rodia had unaccountably given the property to his neighbor, Louis Sauceda. Sauceda shortly sold it for about $500 to another neighbor, Joseph Montoya, who had no interest in the towers but apparently thought the land had commercial possibilities.

City building inspectors began looking askance at Rodia’s project as early as 1948 but took no action until the property had changed hands. In 1957, the Building and Safety Department issued an order to demolish what was left of the house and remove “the dangerous towers,” but the authorities couldn’t locate then-owner Montoya. In 1959, movie actor Nicholas King and filmmaker William Cartwright visited the towers and became concerned about damage from vandalism and neglect. Determined to save the towers, they found Montoya and bought the property. When a friend of Cartwright, architect Ed Farrell, went to City Hall to get a permit to build a cottage on the site, he discovered the demolition order.

The scenario that unfolded pitted a residents group, the newly formed Committee for Simon Rodia’s Towers in Watts, against public officials. City inspectors and engineers compiled extensive reports supporting their contention that the towers were likely to come crashing down in a strong wind or earthquake, or simply collapse from their own weight. When Kenneth Ross, general manager of the city’s Department of Municipal Arts, asked the engineers what they would do with the Leaning Tower of Pisa, he was told it wouldn’t last long in Los Angeles.

The residents’ committee decided that the only way to save the towers was to prove their strength and stability. N.J. “Bud” Goldstone, an aeronautical engineer who has served as a consultant on the towers for more than 40 years, designed a test to show that the towers could withstand a 10,000-pound load, equal to the force of an 80-mph wind. One Saturday afternoon in October 1959, more than 1,000 spectators and several television crews watched as the test failed to budge the tower.

After the cheering subsided, the committee took on the responsibility of maintaining the towers. It turned out to be an expensive undertaking as earthquakes, winds, rains and the ravages of time took a toll on the massive artwork. Out of money, the committee sought help. In 1975--after lengthy negotiations--the committee deeded the towers to the city of Los Angeles.

The arrangement turned sour in 1978, when torrential rains damaged the towers. After a delay of several months, contractor Ralph Vaughn was hired to do the repairs and restoration. His heavy-handed tactics set off an avalanche of complaints and lawsuits, which led the state to take control of the towers and the restoration. It was later revealed that Vaughn had been hired with the help of his longtime friend, Warren Hollier, then president of the Board of Public Works, and that Vaughn paid Hollier $9,500 to smooth over his problems. By then, Hollier had resigned amid a scandal about questionable practices and expenditures.

The fiasco led to a new system of ownership and management, which allowed the towers to receive state funding. It was finally agreed that the state would own the towers and lease them to Los Angeles at no charge. The city would bear the cost of operating and maintaining them.

The towers’ troubles didn’t end, however. The state took over the restoration in 1978 and financed a $1.2-million project to repair the three tallest towers, a project that dragged on until 1985. When that work was complete, other parts of the site were in urgent need of repair, and the burden shifted back to the city.

In 1985, after the state-funded work wound up, the city settled a 1978 lawsuit filed by the Center for Law in the Public Interest, which claimed that the city had allowed the towers to become “irreparably damaged.” The settlement required the city to provide an $800,000 trust fund for restoration, preservation and maintenance, to be dispersed over five years. More work was done, financed by the city trust fund, but the pace was slow and--except for special tours and festivities--the towers were generally inaccessible.

Then came the Northridge earthquake, which put the towers totally off-limits, but at least no one was arguing about who would foot the repair bill. The FEMA money will once again allow L.A. to get a close-up view of the towers.

John Outterbridge, a prominent artist who directed the Watts Towers Arts Center from 1975 to 1992, is ready to celebrate what federal money has accomplished at what he calls “Los Angeles’ Eiffel Tower.” “The very fact that a man who could barely write ‘Sabato Rodia’ built something that has influenced and impressed architects, technological experts and average people really touches me,” Outterbridge says.

But, he cautions, “the spirit of the towers always seems to be in a contest with political posturing.”

Goldstone, who has written a book on Rodia’s work and efforts to save it, looks back on the towers’ history and wonders what their future will be. “The amount of maintenance work the city has done since 1979 is almost zero,” he says. “That’s the issue.”

By now, the city, state and the federal governments have spent nearly $5 million on restoration of the towers over the years, Goldstone points out. Failing to provide basic upkeep at this point is “madness,” he contends.

The question came up at the Los Angeles Cultural Heritage Commission’s last meeting, when commissioners were given copies of a letter from Assistant City Atty. Francisco L. Orozco stating that the city is not legally obligated to pay for regular maintenance of the towers and suggesting that state funds be sought for that purpose. But Commissioner Michael Cornwell noted that Orozco’s reading conflicts with an outside legal opinion and pressed for a prompt resolution of the matter. A more formal opinion, stating the official position of the city’s legal advisors, will be presented at the commission’s next meeting on Wednesday.

Meanwhile, the towers’ supporters have been heartened by the arrival of Margie Johnson Reese, who became general manager of the Cultural Affairs Department last January and has expressed a strong interest in Watts Towers. At the recent meeting, Reese announced that she and her staff had secured a $384,000 grant for the towers’ conservation and maintenance from the state’s Department of Recreation and Parks.

That will provide temporary funding, but Reese said she is determined to find a long-term solution, with the city doing its part. “We are looking at our legal obligation” with the intention of developing a good plan, she said. “Our staff is committed to securing the resources to go forward.” *

Watts Towers lighting ceremony, Sept. 28, 7:30-10 p.m.; Day of the Drum Festival, Sept. 29, 10 a.m.-6 p.m.; Watts Towers Jazz Festival, Sept. 30, 10 a.m.-6 p.m.. Watts Towers and Watts Towers Arts Center, 1727 E. 107th St., Los Angeles. Free. For more information, see www.culturela.org.