Simon Rodia, Architect of Dreams

Nothing is so rare on the part of any man as an act of his own.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

In Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, the Cheshire cat, when she disappeared, left her smile behind. Simon Rodia did the same thing. The Italian immigrant, born in Ribottoli at the foot of Mount Vesuvius, was here among us for 90 years, thirty-some of which he spent in Los Angeles. When he departed, Simon Rodia left behind his smile, Nuestro Pueblo, Watts Towers, that marvel of visionary architecture which soars above the desolation of South Central Los Angeles like a phoenix rising from its own ashes.

Simon Rodia's biographical details are sketchy, unremarkable and rather dreary. Named Sabato (Sabbath) Rodia by parents who wanted him to be a priest, he received little schooling and could neither read nor write Italian or English. As a teenager he followed his elder brother to America, possibly to evade the draft. After a stay in Pennsylvania, where his brother had settled, he moved to Seattle, then to Los Angeles where he took up the trade of tile maker.

In his adopted country he was know "Sam" Rodia. However, the name "Simon"-a misapplication by a journalist in 1937-stuck, and Simon Rodia is the name which appears on the on-site plaque commemorating the Watts Towers and the name by which Rodia is known to the world.

Two broken marriages, the death of a daughter, a growing dependence on alcohol, two sons from whom he was painfully estranged and rarely saw, a life of toil in a country whose language he could scarcely speak or understand and whose customs were strange to him-this was Rodia's portion during his middle years. In later years he became increasingly withdrawn, solitary and single-mindedly preoccupied with the building of his fanciful creation on the site of his home at 1765 East 107th Street. To his neighbors in Watts he was an eccentric, an urban recluse, "that crazy Italian."