“I had in mind to do something big, and I did,” Simon Rodia recounts in artist’s book The Watts Tower. Rodia, an Italian immigrant and tile mason by day, created a series of famed interconnected sculptural structures in Los Angeles’ Watts neighborhood over the course of 33 years, also collecting 70,000 seashells and salvaged bottles to ornament the monument. He chose to work alone and proved his informal education in design and architecture to ultimately be his greatest strength.
The Watts Tower chronicles the history of Simon Rodia’s masterpiece from its inception in 1922 to 1961–a time when many artists and community members came forward to protest the Los Angeles Department of Building and Safety’s demolition plans. William Cartwright and Nicholas King, a film director and actor, purchased the property in 1959, forming The Committee for Simon Rodia’s Towers in Watts and successfully launching a campaign to save Rodia’s life’s work.
Published by The Committee for Simon Rodia’s Towers in Watts, The Watts Tower includes testimony from Cartwright and King directly, as well as Simon Rodia’s poetry and a map of the Towers area provided as tissue-guards at the front and back of the book. The out-of-print publication serves as an important piece of ephemera in Los Angeles’ art history.