Jack Smith The Big Orange Ward Ritchie Press: Pasadena, CA, 1976. 252 pp.
Watts Towers 1959, 1923
""They tried to knock it down, you know."
"In the southeast corner of the section know as Watts there is a piece of 107th Street that is cut off by old Pacific Electric tracks. It can be entered from Wlllowbrook Avenue, but it runs only one short block, and there it dead-ends in the rusted old tracks that slash across the neighborhood on their way to nowhere.
"In most ways it is a typical Watts street; two rows of small frame houses, dateless houses that have outlived their time but are trying to keep up appearances, like old chorus girls, with paint and flowers. But this is a distinguished street, because at its dead end, on a small lot cut like a piece of pie by the old tracks, stand the Watt Towers. They are the most remarkable works of open air art in Southern California, and perhaps in the nation.
"They are the work of the late Simon Rodia, an immigrant Italian who gave up women and liquor at the age of forty and spent the next thirty-three years of his life erecting these implausible monuments." p. 121
" . . . The Watts Towers are a wondrous poem, built in the sky by a man who was possessed by unquenchable urgings and fancies . . . "
"'I wanted to do something big," said Simon Rodia; and he did.
"More than anything else, the towers reminded me of the boojum tree, which is also unique and improbable. It is found only in the wilderness of Baja California, and there is nothing even close to it anywhere else. Ot the three towers, the highest is one hundred feet. They rise like upside-down ice cream cones made of lace and encrusted with costume jewelry.
"A wall runs around Rodia's triangular garden, and it also bears his mark. The wall is a mosaic of Rodia's improvisations. There are panels of broken tile and panels of green bottle glass and plaques of cement in which he impressed his initials, SR, and the date, 1923, and the shape of hammer and tile cutter and the other tools of his trade, or perhaps it should be called his passion. The wall seems without design, without order. Bits of broken tile, yellow and red and blue and purple; pieces of china plates; pieces of green and blue bottles; hundreds of white seashells-all are pressed into the cement of the wall without apparent pattern; yet the wall is a masterpiece. It dazzles the eye and delights the spirit. It is all one lovely harmony." p. 122
" . . . I sat in the gazebo and studied the towers.
"They are made of steel rings and spokes and central cores, all covered with cement, set in chicken wire and encrusted with the humble materials of Rodia's art-the debris of a wasteful society. They are connected by bejeweled spars that leap from one to the other and to the other fancies in the garden-the gazebo and the Marco Polo ship and the fountain-so that all is one interlocking structure.
"Rodia was only a tile setter by trade, without any schooling at all. He owned and boasted of a set of Encyclopaedia Britannica, but nobody was ever sure he could even read, Yet he had created from some infallible inner sense of order this exquisite feat of art and engineering. For thirty-three years he worked alone, rising with his towers, coming down to fill his cement pail and climbing up again to add another bit of frosting. He used no ladders. The towers themselves were his scaffold.
"Why did he work alone?
"'I no have anybody to help me out,' he said one. 'I was a poor man. Had to do a little at a time. Nobody helped me. I think if I hire a man he don't know what to do. A million times I don't know what to do myself.'
"Why did he build his towers at all?
"'Some of the people say what was he doing . . . some of the people think I was crazy and some people said I was going to do something. I wanted to do something. I wanted to do something in the United States because I was raised here you understand? I wanted to do something for the United State because there are nice people in this country . . ." p. 123
"Paul Laporte wrote: "Even the ornamentation, the bits and pieces of tile and glass and china, was essential to provide a protective shell over the reinforced cement . . . 'Thus every part and combination of parts in these structures is a technical necessity while at the same time emerging as the character and beauty of the whole.'" p. 124
"A wood flooring has been laid over the foundations of Rodia's little house. Only the fireplace is left, and the arched doorway, which is faced with pieces of broken mirrors. Everyone come back for a second look at the doorway, seeing himself fragmented, abstracted, in that wall of broken mirrors." p. 124
[One historical consideration might be that so much has been written about the Ocean Park/Los Angeles landscape because it has changed so much so radically that it is always renewing itself, and that writers can find cheap digs from which to write about themselves in that landscape. KR]
"It was a dramatic day, October 10, 1959, when the main tower was put to the test. Reporters and television crews were there. A crowd gathered in the street, some hoping the tower would win, some hoping it would fail. A hydraulic jack was used to apply a ten thousand-pound load to the tower, much more than any wind or quake would give it. It was to be a five-minute test. A minute went by. The crowd was tense. The tower leaned almost imperceptibly. And then the main beam of the test rigging began to give.
"The city surrendered. The test was over. Simon Rodia's innate engineering skill was proved, and his work prevailed.
". . . Many people on the street had been there a long time and remembered Simon, the odd little Italian with the gnarled hands and the big nose.
"Simon used to sing as he worked, forty, fifty feet up, arias from operas and songs nobody in the neighborhood had ever heard anybody else sing. Funny man; complained about everything; taxes and painted women and drinking parents. But loved the country, loved America.
"'He used to go off down that railroad track walking . . . all the way to Wilmington sometimes, with his gunnysack, picking up things. Be gone all day, come back with a sackful of junk.'" p. 125 to 126
"'You know he even put his car in those towers there?' . . . 'Old Hudson. He put the springs and the wheels and everything he could use.' 'What happened to the rest of it then?' . . . "Buried it. Right there by the tracks.' . . ." p.126