Portrait of Sam Rodia. Rodia created the Watts Towers without aid in 33 intensely purposeful years. He worked with no drawing-board designs or machine equipment. The structures were literally "built in the air," using only the simple tools of a tile-setter, together with window-washer's belt and bucket. They are a construction of steel rods, mesh, and mortar, in a maze of forms which soar to a hundred-foot height. The weblike members are covered with a glittering incrustation of broken tiles, dishes, bottles, and more than 70,000 seashells. Woven together by overhead arches around the spires are fountains, pavilions, and labyrinths. This walled magic garden is covered, too, with multicolored mosaic, or with imprints of tools, hands, corncobs, and baskets, interwoven here and there with the initials of their builder, a poor tile-setter who had in his mind for thirty years to do something big, to have his fingerprint on this obscure corner of the world. Photo dated: March 11, 1983.
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