In July of 1999, approximately one month after I moved to Los Angeles, my dear friend Laura Hermann visited. I made my way out to LAX to pick her up. That early in my residency, everything seemed SO far away. I didn’t have the road rage yet – I was merely terrified on the highways. So I took side streets. We chatted as we left LAX – terribly excited by our upcoming time together in a new city. I assumed that the street I took led back to Sepulveda, but about 30 minutes later I looked to the left and noticed that I was directly across from downtown. I had taken Century Blvd.
We decided to aim for downtown from there and we spent the next hour vaguely (and sometimes NOT-so-vaguely) terrified as we drove through scary neighborhood after scary neighborhood. Street lights had been shot out of most of the lights we encountered and shadowy figures resided on darkened corners. We felt incredibly white that night – probably for no reason. I was more scared that night than I was the night I went to Cabrini Green for a crack pickup back in my Chicago days (that’s another story ALTOGETHER). We made it to my new residence on Hollywood and Vista, exhausted and exhilarated
The thing about my dear Laura is, however, that she comes with an agenda – and the next day was no exception. She had her list of things she wanted to see and number one on the list was Watts Towers. We grabbed a Thompson Guide – all 800 pages of it – and set off back through the trails of the night before. And it was glorious.
Last week, amidst all the horrors of the politics of today (Arizona’s racial profiling SB1070, Proposition 8, “Christians” throwing a bloody fit about proposed mosques in New York City and Tennessee , Glenn Beck going insane, and the sound of Meg Whitman droning on and on as she buys a capital), I escaped back to Watts Towers – Nuestro Pueblo: Our Town.
ALL THIS was my tour guide. She’s the cutest, sweetest thing…. I have NO idea what her name is.
An Italian immigrant, Sabato Rodia built Nuestro Pueblo over a period of 33 years. It is the world’s largest single construction created by one individual.
The structures have no welded inner structure. Reinforced steel was wired together then wrapped with wire mesh and hand-packed with mortar. He used sea shells, tiles, broken crockery, green ginger ale bottles, and glass insulators as embellishments; the towers sparkle in the daylight.
Sabato “Simon” Rodia, born in southern Italy in 1879, immigrated to the United States around the age of ten and worked on his sculpture from 1921 – 1954. When asked about the project, he stated: “I had it in mind to do something big, and I did it.”
Do you ever get the feeling that you should be doing more?
END TOUR. 
