Friday, November 23, 2007

The Watts Towers

Hi everybody! If I still have any readers left, I would like to apologize for disappearing for a while there. Here are some photos that I took on my recent trip to Los Angeles. We visited the Watts Towers, a place which Gabe has been chomping at the bit to see for a long time. They are these incredible structures built by a man named Simon Rodia over a period of 33 years, from 1921 to 1954. He just wanted to build something, so he turned his property into a great big piece of art. It is now owned by the city and operates as a park and art center. The whole structure is made out of rebar, concrete, and basically, trash. He used broken dishes, shells, bottles, cans, etc. to create incredible mosaics all over the structures. First, the details:










Now, the structures themselves. Sorry for so many photos of the same thing in a row. I was having a hard time deciding which ones to leave out. These towers are so awesome I could have spent a week photographing every inch of them!