The hook
An Italian immigrant tile-setter spent thirty-three years building seventeen steel towers in his Watts backyard out of broken glass and pottery, the tallest a hundred feet, then handed over the deed and walked away.
01Why it's worth it
Simon Rodia had no plans, no crew, and no engineering training. From 1921 to 1954 he worked alone in the evenings on his lot in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles, bending steel rebar, wrapping it in mesh and mortar, and pressing in whatever he had, broken tile and seashells and soda bottles and pottery shards, thousands of them, until seventeen interlaced towers stood over the little property, the tallest reaching nearly a hundred feet. He called it Nuestro Pueblo. In 1955 he deeded the land to a neighbor and left, and never came back. When the city tried to condemn the towers as unsafe, engineers rigged a cable to one in 1959 and pulled with ten thousand pounds of force; the tower held and the truck nearly tipped, so they let it stand. It's a National Historic Landmark now, one of the great works of outsider art anywhere, made by one man with hand tools for no reason but to make it.
02How to experience it
The towers are in Watts, in South Los Angeles, inside a small state historic park. You can see them over the fence any time, but the up-close tours of the enclosure run only certain days, so check first. It's an ordinary residential neighborhood, so come in daylight, and stop in at the adjacent arts center for the story. It fits with a downtown LA day.