In the same week as the UK riots, a small group gathered 5,500 miles away to remember the Watts riot that began on 11 August 1965. That riot also led to a national outcry, an inquiry and pledges of reform …
But little has changed in the decades since then in Watts, a poor black suburb just south of downtown Los Angeles. It is all sun-baked concrete and small bungalows behind iron fences. The district does, however, happen to be the home of one of the world's great public artworks: the Watts Towers.
Built by a semi-literate Italian immigrant named Simon Rodia, who worked alone for 33 years from 1921 to 1954, the Towers are a 15-minute Metro ride from the city centre. I got off at 103rd Street, expecting to see the Towers – the tallest of which is 99.5 feet – but I had to cross the tracks and walk down a dusty road until they appeared around a corner, three minarets sparkling in the morning sun.
For years, the Towers were closed to the public, caught in a political limbo of funding and restoration. Today there are tours but few Angelenos visit. My guide was Dakota, a piano student at the Charles Mingus Center (Mingus was raised in Watts), part of the modern Arts Center built beside the Towers in 1970 and one of the few positive legacies of the riots. The Center has a gallery showing African-American works, stages LA's oldest annual jazz festival and offers classes in painting, sculpture, music, dance and film animation to local youngsters, taught by professional artists.
Rodia's surprisingly small, triangular site contains the footprint of his modest house (since burned down) and 17 tower-like structures including an outdoor oven and the font where Rodia performed baptisms and weddings, though he had no religious status or affiliation. He built the towers with hand tools as his only equipment. An adjacent railway line (also long gone) was his anvil: he placed metal on the tracks for passing trains to flatten it.
Low walls around the site are studded with blue milk of magnesia bottles in wave formations and more than 25,000 seashells. The three tallest towers are like masts waiting to sail back to the home Rodia left age 15 in Nola, where every year they hold a Festa dei Gigli. The Gigli – huge lilies made of papier maché and wood that are paraded around the town for the feast of St Paulinus – look a lot like Rodia's towers.
Rodia was 46 years old when he started to build. Using nothing but found objects, he was the ultimate recycler. His decorations are broken bottles, mostly 7-Up and Canada Dry green; old crockery collected for him by local children (when they weren't vandalising his work) and tiles. Many tiles came from the Malibu tile company where Rodia worked for 10 years.
A taciturn man, the nearest Rodia ever came to explaining his masterpiece was to say, "I had in mind to do something big and I did it." Typically, at 75, after a fall, he gave the house and the towers to a neighbour and moved away without a backward glance to live the last 10 years of his life with his sister in northern California. It was only when the neighbour sold out to a would-be developer that the City of Los Angeles became aware of the towers and promptly ordered their demolition on safety grounds. Campaigners saved them by devising a strength test. A crane tried to pull them over but the crane and its steel hawser buckled, not the Towers.
Like Rodia's personality, his Towers have proved an awkward legacy for LA: who should pay for their upkeep? And do they symbolise the division or reconciliation between rich white west LA and poor black east LA? This year the LA County Museum of Art took over the conservation effort, a move to which Rosie Lee Hooks, the Watts Towers Arts Center's redoubtable director, gave a cautious welcome.
To stand inside one of Rodia's towers and look up through the spider web of steel and concrete made me dizzy, like standing in a dream. As Hooks told me: "Watts is still a challenged community but what Simon teaches us is the power of art to change things."
1727 East 107th Street, +213 847 4646, wattstowers.org, tours Thurs-Sat 10.30am-3pm, Sun 12.30pm-3pm, adults $7, children aged 13-17 $3, under 13s free
