THE PARADOX OF PLACE: TEACHING COMMUNITY ONE TOWER AT A TIME
Community Works Journal
May 29, 2020
Sabato Rodia was 15 when he left his native Italy for the New World. He wandered the Americas for decades, from Canada to Brazil, working odd jobs, getting married and divorced, drinking too much and generally drifting without purpose. He eventually settled in a funky corner of Los Angeles called Watts, where he worked as a tile setter. In 1921, at age 42, Sabato Rodia began to build something curious in his yard. He did not stop for 33 years. What he built continues to amaze, confound and inspire.
What are Sabato Rodia’s “Watts Towers”? What do they teach us about Rodia, and what can Rodia teach us about learning?
In the 1920s, Watts was a rural outpost on the southern edge of Los Angeles. Unpaved streets lent it its nickname, “Mudtown.” Milk was delivered by horse and buggy, and neighbors raised chickens and hogs. Children crawfished in the canal. Hot bands featuring first generation New Orleans jazz musicians, such as Jelly Roll Morton and Kid Ory, played all night dances. Watts was a vibrant place, off the grid, a dusty cultural mashup. A poor man’s paradise.
Black migrants from the American South, European immigrants, Mexican, Chinese and Japanese people all lived in pre-war Watts. The memoirs and oral histories of the jazz musicians who grew up in Watts reveal a universal sense of racial harmony and integration.
Even in Watts, Rodia stood out as eccentric. His neighbors were awed, if not confused, by his work. He was mocked by some, studied by others. But mostly Rodia was a loner, working privately while in full view of his community, changing the landscape with his daydreams.
Rodia’s little lot on 107th Street sat alongside the Pacific Electric railroad tracks, in view of 100,000 weekly “Red Car” commuters passing between Long Beach and Los Angeles. In the age before freeways, or even paved interconnecting roads in much of South Los Angeles, Rodia’s yard held the promise of a daily captive audience. In this regard he tapped into the Southern Californian ethos of roadside attractions. With the advent of Route 66 in the 1920s, Americans came to California on the move. This was reflected in the early architecture of Los Angeles, where buildings shaped like tamales, chili bowls and giant donuts vied for the attention of passing motorists. (Remnants of this phenomenon are scattered today throughout Southern California, mostly repurposed or otherwise hiding in plain sight.)
Rodia’s work, which stands proudly today in the same spot in which it was slowly constructed between 1921-1954, is known as the “Watts Towers.” Rodia named it Nuestro Pueblo. They aren’t really towers, per se. Just what it is and what it is meant to represent is little understood, but presents itself clearly after a modest study of Rodia, and the manner in which he lived and worked.
What little we know about him comes from the few interviews he granted journalists and folklorists over the years. Rodia’s own words, however, must be approached cautiously. Most of these interviews were conducted late in his life, after he had completed and abandoned his Nuestro Pueblo. By the time academics took an interest in hearing his story, he had lost any interest he may have had in telling it. Furthering the confusion, Rodia spoke in broken English with a thick Italian-American accent, a lilting, almost musical cadence. Neighbors were unsure if he even spoke English. When I hear Rodia speak I hear my great-grandparents, the same cadence and broken “Italio-English.” Compounding this, there is an inherent Italian tendency (especially among Rodia’s generation) toward obfuscation. There are very few concrete answers in Italy; things are nebulous, pronouns often unspecified, entire conversations spoken almost in code. We must consider all of this when studying Rodia’s own words.
I see in images of Rodia, and in his work itself, people I grew up with. I was raised in Southern California with four living great-grandparents, all immigrants, three of whom came to America from Italy around the same age as Rodia. (Rodia at 15; my great-grandfather, Nonno, 16, my great-grandmother, Nonna, 12). In 1929, my family settled in Downey, which at the time, like Watts, was a small rural town on the southern outskirts of Los Angeles. My great-grandmother, who we called “Nonna Swing,” sold fruit (and sometimes Nonno’s homemade wine). Like Rodia, Nonna was an unlikely modernist in her own way, even with her simple black dresses and stout Sicilian legs. Having known the limitations of the Old World ways of her tiny sulfur mining village, Nonna Swing never looked back. She drove her A-Model Ford to the many farms and small towns of 1930s Los Angeles, now paved over with subdivisions and strip malls.
Stories flew rapidly around my grandparents' kitchen table when I was growing up, where multiple simultaneous conversations in multiple simultaneous languages created its own aural mosaic. I heard something once about Nonna Swing taking my grandfather, Sal, as a boy to visit Sabato Rodia at his home. I often ponder their conversation. My family was tied in strongly to the Italian immigrant community in Southeast Los Angeles at the time, and it is sensible Nonna Swing knew about the eccentric Italian down the road in Watts. Maybe she drove there in her A-Model Ford to deliver oranges, or to bring him empty 7Up bottles, or maybe she wanted to see his work for her son and for herself.
Surely my adolescent grandfather would have been inspired by the sight of Rodia’s spires, rising from the vast flatlands and orange groves like a sparkling, tiled wonder on their approach in Nonna’s Ford. I never talked about it with him. But I do know that my grandfather was a man who never considered that something might be impossible. It just wasn’t in his makeup. He saw no limitations, no obstacles. He spent his life turning his dreams into reality, seemingly effortlessly. I don’t know if he learned this from Rodia, but if Rodia’s Nuestro Pueblo can be reduced to a single urge, it is the manifestation of daydreams against odds.
Do, Fail, Do Again
Rodia’s eccentricities may have seemed haphazard to his neighbors, but he was at all times an artist working within a process, a system. One of our best sources of insight into Rodia’s process comes from Charles Mingus’ 1971 autobiography, Beneath the Underdog. Mingus, a jazz virtuoso considered among the greatest American composers, was born and raised in Watts. In Los Angeles’ pre-war African-American community, music education was paramount. Mingus and his peers studied classical music as much as jazz, digging Stravinsky and Jelly Roll Morton equally.
When boyhood Mingus watched Rodia at his craft, he was watching an artist doing, failing, reconsidering, and doing again. Trial and error.
“Around his small frame house he had made a low wall shaped like a ship and inside it he was constructing what looked like three masts, all different heights, shaped like upside-down ice cream cones. First he would set up skeletons of metal and chicken wire, and plaster them over with concrete, then he'd cover that with fancy designs made of pieces of seashells and mirrors and things. He was always changing his ideas while he worked and tearing down what he wasn't satisfied with and starting over again, so pinnacles tall as a two-story building would rise up and disappear and rise again. What was there yesterday mightn't be there next time you looked, but then another lacy-looking tower would spring up in its place.”
Musical composition works the same way. Most crafts do. A composer follows a thread, shaping and discarding ideas. When the composer adds harmony he or she tries new things, always thinking outside the box — the very definition of composing, if defined in-part as creating something new, requires breaking the rules. There will always be bad fits, things that need to be tried, considered, then rejected until it’s right.
Buddy Collette, another Watts-born jazz legend, recalled similar impressions in his 2000 autobiography, Jazz Generations:
“Watts was very conductive [sic] to creativity. When Charles Mingus, Bobby and Cecil (Big Jay) McNeely, and I were going to school, we saw Simon Rodia working on the Watts Towers . . . He carried an old burlap sack on his back that he’d fill with little rocks, bottle caps, broken bottles, shells, and all that material he was gathering to build his towers . . . It wasn’t until later that we could see that the guy was very artistic and knew where he was going.”
Passionate doers and learners are limited only by their imagination. When asked his motivations, Rodia would sometimes reply in his sing-songy broken English, “Why a man make the shoes?” At some point, this compulsion to simply do became a desire to do something great. “You gotta do something they never got ‘em in the world,” he said. If he had no yard he would have found some place as the base for his expression. He used materials at hand, such as broken glass and seashells. If these were not readily available, he would have used what was. He had no machinery, so when he needed to shape long pieces of steel he leveraged them against the railroad tracks. He imagined a way to literally bend steel with his bare hands.
We should encourage daydreams and mistakes, welcoming the infinite possibility of failure paired with doing again.
Learn How to See
“Study the science of art. Study the art of science. Develop your senses — especially learn how to see. Realize that everything connects to everything else.”
- Leonardo Da Vinci
We live in binary times. Most aspects of our lives have become digitized, for better or for worse, reduced to a series of ones and zeros. This affects thought; we begin to think in binary terms. We see people as either this or that: introvert or extrovert, “T” or “F.” The old adage that there are three sides to every story proves that the truth lies somewhere in between two binary poles. True learning isn’t binary. Learning requires an understanding of how concepts fit into an overall system, a mosaic.
Rodia was an artist, so he was going to find some mechanism of expression to suit him. His tile laying and cement finishing skills were essential to the chosen form of his art. Lacking these skills, he would have chosen another form. Laying tile requires an appreciation of aesthetics, just as creating art requires vocational skill.
We separate academic studies into categories — sciences, humanities, arts — but these distinctions are for practicality. The truth is that all academic study, all learning, is interconnected. Art and Shop go together like Math and Music.
We offer students different subjects, with different names; we assign them different books, different teachers and classrooms — and so the connections fail us. Rodia’s Watts Towers are Art, Math, Science, Language, Physical Education, History, Geography, Social Studies and Shop classes all rolled into one, shattered into interchangeable shards and recirculated as a mosaic tower.
The spark of insight that reinforces these connections can come from anywhere. In my experience, I had a natural understanding of music, yet I barely scraped by in math classes. Part of this may have been a lack of focus on my part, but there was also a lack of competent teaching. My public high school geometry teacher was the wrestling coach, short-shorts, whistle and all. The softball coach taught my trigonometry class.
Surprisingly, I scored higher on the SAT math section, despite getting Cs and Ds in math classes, and mostly As in English. My instinctual understanding of math did not translate into the classroom. Why? The ability was within me, if only there had been someone to point out the connections.
The same is true for one who builds with their hands. We know Rodia had little or no formal education. Yet he constructed something out of junk parts that a team of city engineers could not topple using all of their cranes and compasses. Rodia put all of his skills to use, learning by doing and failing, learning how to see.
The Paradox of Place
Like many Italian immigrants of his generation, Sabato Rodia carried pride in the great explorers, artists and architects of his native land. He would often talk of these men he admired, like Galileo Galilei, Amerigo Vespuci and Guglielmo Marconi.
Italian immigrants like Nonno and Rodia held an appreciation for their new home while never losing the love of their homeland. These two emotions can exist simultaneously without conflict. Many Italian immigrants at the turn of the 20th century never intended to stay in America. Some, like Nonno, returned to Italy, sometimes more than once, before eventually remaining in America. They carried this duality with them as they carved out new lives in a new land. This dichotomous and complicated sense of place for those who stayed is an existential element of Rodia’s work.
Those who have seen Rodia’s “Watts Towers” only in photographs are often struck by its beauty and puzzled by its meaning. Here is the gist: Sabato Rodia’s pride and longing for his native Italy informed the remarkable art he made in Watts. When considered from the right angle, and with the right frame of mind, the “Towers” become a ship, representing Italian exploration and emigration; the three tallest structures serve as masts. Considered from a different angle these same masts become before your eyes spires of a grand cathedral. Beneath them Rodia constructed gazebos and fountains, passageways and sitting areas. (His original design even included a table, the sacred heart of the Italian home.)
Up close, the shape is obscured by its micro-detail of small pieces, like an impressionist painting. Stepping back, the whole thing becomes an obvious tribute to Italy: it is at once a ship, a cathedral, a fountain, a piazza, the many floats of Italian fetse, a village — Nuestro Pueblo.
Rodia took materials from Watts, and the beaches of Long Beach and San Pedro — the place of his reality — and erected them into a tribute to his native land — the place of his heart. While there are other motivating factors — especially Rodia’s newfound sobriety and urge for redemption — that is the essence of his art.
There are aesthetic similarities between Rodia’s spires and the papier-mâché obelisk floats of the Festa dei Gigli in Nola, Italy, which Rodia almost certainly witnessed as a child. The importance of such regional feste on the Italian people can not be overstated. My family, in Gubbio, celebrate the Festa dei Ceri each May, where groups of men carry three large, heavy obelisks called Ceri, each representing a different patron saint, through the mountainous streets of Gubbio. It has been going on for more than 900 years. During Nazi occupation, the Eugubini held a modified version of the festival in the seclusion of the woods. Soldiers from Gubbio recreated the Ceri while away at war. (This year the Ceri has been canceled for the first time in almost a millennium due to the COVID-19 crisis, something even the Nazis couldn’t achieve).
Italian immigrants often settled in areas where others from their region already were. My family originally settled in Jessup, a coal mining town in Lackawanna County, Pennsylvania. There was ample, albeit dangerous, work in the mines, attracting many Italian immigrants. Many of the Italians who settled in Jessup were from Gubbio, so they eventually became official sister cities. Beginning in 1909, these Eugubini immigrants began to recreate their beloved Ceri on the streets of Pennsylvania, a tradition that continues to this day.
As the Eugubini settled in Jessup, the Nolani settled in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, where the Festa dei Giglio of Rodia’s youth has been re-created since 1903. Maybe Rodia saw a re-creation of the Giglio in Brooklyn. Maybe he simply carried its memory from his formative years near Nola. He spent time in Pennsylvania coal country, where his brother was killed in the mines. Perhaps he saw the re-creation of the Ceri there, and it reminded him of his boyhood Giglio.
In some ways, Rodia can be seen as an artist in exile. By his own words he loved America and had no desire to go back to Italy. But the pride and the longing remained. In this way he is similar to James Joyce, who fled his native Ireland as a young man and never returned. Joyce, a modernist, had no interest in looking back to Irish folklore or history, yet his setting was always in an Irish past, the Dublin of his formative years. Like Rodia, Joyce deserted in life the very place he returned to in his work. This is the paradox of place.
Many people living in America today have this dual sense of place, and it needn't be disharmonious. The ability to hold two concepts, even paradoxical ones, at once is among the most important lessons any person can learn.
The very name Nuestro Pueblo is a paradox. In Spanish it can mean our people, or our town, perhaps a nod to his Mexican neighbors. When asked about the name, Rodia said, “Meansa many things, means lots of different things.”
Rodia frequented El Pueblo de Los Angeles plaza in Downtown Los Angeles, the historical and spiritual core of the city from the old Spanish days. Diverse groups of people worked and congregated in this urban hub, including a large Italian presence. The Italian Hall building, which today houses the Italian American Museum of Los Angeles, was the center of Italian civic life in Rodia’s time, and he attended events and dances there. He talks about spending time in this area near the Pueblo, even claiming to have gotten the idea to use a window washer’s belt instead of scaffolding on his towers by watching workers building nearby City Hall, Los Angeles’ other iconic tower.
In the definitive source on Rodia, a collection of essays and interviews entitled Sabato Rodia’s Towers in Watts: Art, Migrations, Development, editor Luisa del Giudice suggests Nuestro Pueblo is a purposeful nod to El Pueblo de Los Angeles, and to Rodia’s Italianess. The Los Angeles basin in the 1920s and 30s was not conceived of as one cohesive place, but a patchwork of independent small towns, like Watts and Downey. Perhaps Rodia wanted passersby on the daily trains to consider his Italian monument in Watts as symbiotic with the heart of Los Angeles. Del Giudice writes in her introduction: “Nuestro Pueblo may be a symbolic representation of his Italianess as well as a reflection on the city’s identity (i.e., a representation of “our people” [nostro popolo], or Italians; and of “our town” [nuestro pueblo], or OUR Los Angeles).”
There needn't be one answer, or any answer; part of Neustro Pueblo’s majesty is in its nebulous form, its ability to shift shape depending on one’s vantage, one’s history, one’s own sense of place.
Conclusion
Nuestro Pueblo raises complex issues of preservation and community, mostly outside the scope of this article, other than to mention that were it not for the relentless efforts of a very small group of people, Rodia’s dream would have been destroyed long ago. Even civic agencies tasked with preserving the Watts Towers at times worked purposefully toward its demise. The lesson here is that no individual is too small or insignificant to affect real change within their community.
While Rodia’s Nuestro Pueblo today houses a vibrant community arts center, the Watts community sometimes had a complicated relationship with the Towers. The latter half of the 20th century brought to Watts worsening unemployment and poverty and an increasingly hostile police presence, culminating in the uprising of August 1965 known as the Watts Riots. It was not always appreciated when resources went toward preserving an eccentric Italian’s abandoned vision from decades past while the people of Watts lacked jobs and basic services.
But Nuestro Pueblo transcends its physical form. “Everybody living in the city of Watts from 1920 through 1940 has something from their personal families embedded in the structure. That’s why they all feel that they are a part of it,” said Judson Powell, an artist, musician and educator in Watts. “It belongs to them because they are indeed represented on it. So, he involved the whole community in his act. That’s one of the things that makes it so viable.”
In his 1967 children’s book, Beautiful Junk, Jon Madian, an educator working in Watts at the time, imagines a fictional boy following around a fictionalized Rodia as they gather junk to use in the Towers. We know from Mingus, Collette, and others, that children were intrigued by Rodia’s work, and Rodia paid modest sums for sacks of empty bottles, allowing neighborhood kids an opportunity to contribute, repurposing street debris into Rodia’s rising pueblo.
Rodia’s original impulse came at a time in his life when he sought redemption.
“When I was drinking,” he said, ”I got lay off three, four time on the jobs. Then I throw the damn bottle away. . .I started to build.”
If one believes, as I do, that bettering your community — your place — begins with looking within to better yourself, then think of what Rodia accomplished. He repurposed his redemptive urges into a regenerating tribute to Italy, presented as an endless gift to Watts.
In 1954, after 33 years of building, Sabato Rodia walked away from his life’s work, where he at one time had planned to be buried. Believing a man should die with his family, the loner left Watts after suffering a stroke to live near his sister in Northern California. Preservationists encouraged Rodia to return to his Towers many times, but he never would. “No, I won’t go back there,” he said. “I break my heart there.”
“When I look at the towers they make me feel good,” said a 13-year-old member of one of the many youth workshops affiliated with the Watts Towers Arts Center. “They make me feel good because a man made something that he would be remembered for, and he got remembered by leaving his mark, and that mark he left now represents our city.”
Sabato Rodia’s Nuestro Pueblo has somehow survived a century since inception in a city that consumes itself almost by definition. In 1933, the Long Beach earthquake leveled the bricks of nearby Jefferson High School. Rodia’s towers stood. When Watts went up in flames in 1965, Rodia’s towers stood. In 1959, the city of Los Angeles subjected Rodia’s dream to 10,000 pounds of hydraulic pressure in a deliberate attempt to bring it crashing down. His towers — our pueblo — stood.
“I wanted to do something in the United States because I was raised here, you understand?” Rodia once said. “I had it in my mind to do something big — and I did.”
