WATTS TOWERS ARTS CENTER CAMPUS
SAVE THE WATTS CULTURAL CRESCENT,
WATTS HISTORY…AND THE WATTS TOWERS!
by Edward Landler
for the Watts Towers Arts Center Campus support groups
In 1959, a local, state, national and international coalition stopped the City of Los Angeles from tearing down the Watts Towers. Today, seeking to encase the Towers in a vapid urbanized box and destroy a major cultural landscape, the City once again seeks to diminish a masterwork.
Since the 1960s, Watts residents have called for the bare 10-acre open space stretching along the railroad tracks from the world-famous Watts Towers to the 103rd Street Watts Train Station to be developed into a cultural green park for their underserved community. Called the “Hub of the Universe” since 1910, this land at Watts’ geographic center links the Towers (a National Historic Landmark and a California State Park) and the Station (built in 1904 and listed on the National Register of Historic Places).
In the early ‘90s, the Watts Towers Community Action Council (WTCAC) attracted broad-based community involvement and support to design the Watts Cultural Crescent Project through well-publicized and well-attended presentations and discussion groups. In 1994, the WTCAC presented its Watts Cultural Crescent Master Plan to the City of Los Angeles. Although the City government dismissed the community’s design, over the next five years it installed a few of its elements in unsuitable locations on the Towers Campus without consulting the WTCAC. Since that time, the City has continued to distance the residents of Watts from the process of protecting and enhancing their community’s history and culture.
After the City’s Community Redevelopment Agency was dissolved in 2012, the property along the tracks was transferred to the County of Los Angeles with the stipulation that the natural connection between Towers and Station be preserved. But, in 2018, under the pretext of complying to California’s “transit-oriented community” directive, the Los Angeles City Council quietly allowed the County to sell the land intended for the Watts Cultural Crescent to the non-profit Housing Corporation of America (HCA).
More recently, setting aside the desire and need for a central green park that would help attract visitors to the Watts Towers as a major tourist destination, the City fast-tracked its approval of five-story “affordable” housing projects on this land that will literally and visually split the Watts community in two. Instead of locating what will be the tallest buildings in Watts in less obtrusive sites, these five-story developments and their inevitable parking needs will choke off traffic between the east and west sides of the community.
If built on this site, this long wall of high-rises will also eliminate major access to the Watts Towers, limit the clear view of this monumental work of architectural sculpture, and undermine the State of California’s nomination of the Watts Towers as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. It will also limit the ability of Watts residents and their children from benefiting from the vital arts education and exhibition programs of the Watts Towers Arts Center Campus.
The Towers were created single-handedly over 30 years by Italian immigrant Sabato “Simon” Rodia – he called them Nuestro Pueblo, “Our Town”. When Rodia started building in 1921, he wanted the view from the tracks to display his envisioned 100-foot tall mosaic-covered spires rising over their environment, greeting neighbors and visitors – as it has now for 100 years.
In 1959, they were brought to the world’s attention as a work of engineering and aesthetic genius when the Committee for Simon Rodia’s Towers in Watts saved them from an official City demolition order. During the 1965 Watts Uprising, the Towers were protected by a community that had adopted them as their beacon of freedom and initiative, their own “Statue of Liberty”.
Now, instead of placing massive housing projects on less obstructive sites, the City seems intent on crippling the community’s hopes of self-determination as symbolized in their Towers. In fact, with direct engagement further limited by the pandemic, the City failed to provide adequate notification of public hearings that allowed the City Council to exempt these projects from environmental review as mandated by the California Environmental Quality Act. With the highest rate of pollution in Los Angeles, Watts has a well-documented history of environmental hazards, especially along its railway embankments.
These projects represent a process that consistently ignores legal precedent and excludes concerned community residents and stakeholders from contributing to plans that directly affect their own future. The City’s pretense of community engagement while erasing the history of communities of color aptly describes the first steps of “gentrification”.
The Watts Towers Arts Center Campus support groups ask you to sign this Change.org petition (please note that any donations asked for by Change.org go directly to Change.org and not the Friends of Watts Towers Arts Center):
FOR THE GREATEST IMPACT, send your own letter to City and State public servants in support of our efforts, using this sample letter and procedure as a model: