News from The Opposite Field

Although Max’s list of colleges and potential careers fluctuates as wildly as the Dodgers’ pitching staff these days, he has been expressing quite a bit of interest in architecture—a merging of the creative and the physical that he finds appealing—and so we have begun regular father-son expeditions to some of L.A.’s historic landmarks. This past weekend the destination was the Watts Towers, a trip partly inspired by a Los Angeles Times column last month, “Watts Towers—World’s Treasure, L.A.’s Secret,” by my friend and former colleague Hector Tobar. I had visited the Watts Towers on several occasions, and yet I had never been inside, under and within the structures, always settling for the view just beyond the perimeter fence. As Hector points out, short-sighted bureaucrats have ensured that many visitors will experience it that way: Monday through Thursday the grounds are shuttered.

A donation of $7 each entitled us to a tour with a pith-helmeted James Janisse, formerly a jazz DJ at KKJZ and probably the coolest (and frankest) guide anywhere in the city. As a kid in the neighborhood half a century ago, he used to climb the spires, ascending the maze of  hoops and pipes and curlicues as if it were his secret tree fort, and now he gets to play guardian, educating and inspiring a new generation of converts. Being shepherded through the interior made me feel like a rube: All these years in L.A., and what I thought I knew about the Watts Towers proved to be only the most superficial of impressions. The level of detail—the craftsmanship, the madness—was staggering, a mosaic of bottles and cups and plates and mirrors and shells that turns out, on closer inspection, to be intended to replicate a ship. 

The story of the artist, an illiterate Italian immigrant named Simon Rodia, was somewhat familiar to me, the 33 years he spent assembling his monument on East 107th Street, designing by eye and working by hand, a lonesome obsession. We were invited afterward to watch a short documentary, made in the 1950s, the closest thing to an official account of Rodia’s life, and the most extraordinary part was hearing his name mispronounced, over and over. Apparently the producers were given the spelling by a neighbor of Latino descent, who conveyed it, phonetically, as Rodilla—the Spanish word for knee—and so all throughout the film, the narrator keeps saying Ro-DILL-a. It was heartbreaking, and perfect.    

Photo: Forest Casey