Impressive People: Stories of Remarkable Lives - Sykalo Eugen 2025

Simon Rodia – An Italian immigrant who spent 33 years building the Watts Towers from trash, alone

Somewhere in South Los Angeles, on a cracked corner of 107th Street, rising like a mirage from the soot and sprawl, stand seventeen spindly towers made of scrap. Steel pipes twisted like question marks. Spires flecked with blue and green glass. Tiles from broken bathtubs. Seashells. Handprints. Bottle caps. It looks like a spaceship crash-landed into a junkyard and grew wings.

This is the Watts Towers — or as he called them, Nuestro Pueblo. Our Town.

But the town never really claimed him.

Simon Rodia built the whole thing with his bare hands. No cranes. No blueprints. No funding. Just a welder’s torch, a bag of cement, and the kind of monomaniacal devotion that makes people either saints or lunatics. For thirty-three years — from 1921 to 1954 — he worked alone. Climbing barefoot, hundreds of times, up hand-rigged scaffolds to bolt together a personal cathedral no one asked for.

No one helped him. No one stopped him. No one really understood what he was doing until long after he vanished.

Simon Rodia was five feet tall, hard of hearing, and by all accounts, impossible to like. “He didn’t talk much,” neighbors said. “When he did, he yelled.” He wore overalls covered in plaster dust and chain-smoked while welding. He didn’t trust banks. Or architects. Or God, probably. But he trusted cement. And wire. And the power of doing one impossible thing very, very slowly.

He was born Sabato Rodia in Serino, Italy, sometime in 1879 — though the records blur. Like many Southern Italians of that generation, he fled rural poverty and landed in Pennsylvania coal country before drifting west. His brother died in a mining accident. Simon became a day laborer, tile-setter, construction grunt. He married. Had kids. Lost them all — first to divorce, then distance, then time. There are missing years. Lost addresses. He drank. He fought. He moved again.

By the time he arrived in Watts, he was a man already shrunk into myth: a loner, burned by family and country, fluent in cement but not forgiveness.

He bought a triangular lot squeezed between the train tracks and some auto shops. Built a shack. And then — as if to mark the coordinates of a forgotten dream — he started building something taller than himself.

At first, people thought he was fixing something. Then they realized he wasn’t stopping.

He scavenged rebar from the rails, wire from the dump, porcelain from junkyards. He climbed every evening after his shift, welding into the pink smoggy dusk. He embedded bits of mirror, marble, and soda bottles into the plaster — each one catching the Los Angeles sun like a tiny promise. Children would sneak by and call him crazy. Sometimes he barked. Sometimes he offered them candy and told them to go home and do something better.

He never explained what the towers were.

Art critics didn’t visit Watts. The art world didn’t know Watts existed. Simon wasn’t trained. He wasn’t trying to be discovered. “I want to do something big,” he once said, “and I did it.”

That was the closest thing he gave to a thesis statement.

Still, something about the structure defied invisibility. The tallest tower reached nearly 100 feet — higher than the Statue of Liberty’s base. Every inch of the surface was hand-decorated. There were hearts, stars, symbols. Spirals. Shapes that felt Mesoamerican, Moorish, Gothic — but that came, most likely, from his own memory’s stew: church mosaics in Naples, Spanish tiles, maybe the feel of Neapolitan baroque filtered through South Central dust.

He called it a “ship.” A “temple.” A “tower to the sky.”

City inspectors called it illegal.

Again and again, they tried to tear it down. Said it wasn’t up to code. Said it posed a hazard. Neighbors grumbled. Vandals tried to torch it. Kids smashed the ceramic tiles. But Simon kept patching. He worked quietly. Obsessively. Thirty-three years of this — until one day, in 1954, he simply gave up.

He gave the keys to a neighbor. Walked out the gate. Disappeared.

No farewell. No speech. He never saw the towers again.

He moved north, to Martinez, California. Lived in a boarding house. Died quietly in 1965, at the age of 86. His obituary barely mentioned the towers.

And then something strange happened.

The world turned.

Art changed. Outsider art became a thing — visionary environments, they called them. Suddenly, Simon was a genius. Museums sent scouts. Journalists wrote profiles. Art historians called the towers one of the greatest pieces of folk art in America. Buckminster Fuller came to visit. So did Georgia O’Keeffe. The city tried to demolish them anyway. Said they weren’t safe.

So a group of artists — mostly young, mostly broke, mostly white — paid for an engineering test. They hooked the towers up to a truck and tried to yank them down.

The towers held.

Even now, in the tremble of earthquake country, they hold.

Today, the Watts Towers are a National Historic Landmark. Tourists come. Influencers take photos. A museum sprouted beside them. But the neighborhood is still the neighborhood: beautiful, battered, complicated. There’s barbed wire and chain-link fence. Graffiti. Helicopters. The towers remain a miracle no one asked for — jutting into the sky like a question.

Who builds a cathedral for a city that won’t look?

Simon Rodia didn’t build for money. Or praise. Or legacy. He built because he had to. Because the only way to hold the pieces of his life together was with wire and plaster. Because grief needs scaffolding too.

In an age obsessed with speed, the Watts Towers are a sermon in slowness.

In a city known for artificial dreams, they are real — messily, gloriously real.

They shimmer. Still.

As if the sun itself remembers him.