Abstract
The Watts Towers (WT), an iconic Los Angeles artwork created by Sabato Rodia in 1921–1954, is covered with mosaics whose elements include thousands of mollusk shells. Little is known about the diversity or sources of these shells. Here, we document the diversity of mollusk shells present in the WT and use data on their characteristics to make inferences about their provenance. We identified shells of 34 species, 24 of them bivalves (clams and their relatives) and 10 gastropods (snails). Almost all (29/34) of these species are native to southern California shorelines, especially those of bays and estuaries. Rodia could have accessed these sites on foot, by automobile, or by using the Red Car trolley system. Some of the bivalve shells bear drill holes made by naticid gastropods, suggesting that they were collected post-mortem, presumably after they had washed up on beaches. These observations are consistent with the sparse documentary evidence on the origin of the shells of the WT. This detailed information on the diversity of the seashells of the WT should be of utility to conservators, and of interest to scholars of and visitors to the WT.
Highlights
The Watts Towers (WT), known as Nuestro Pueblo, or the Towers of Simon Rodia, is an assemblage of numerous interconnected structures built by Italian immigrant Sabato Rodia between 1921 and 1954, in the Watts area of Los Angeles
We identified the shells of 34 species of mollusks embedded in the WT (Table 2; Appendix)
Though we did not quantify the numbers of each type of shell present in the WT, our observations suggest that the most common bivalve shells in the WT belong to Argopecten ventricosus, Chione californiensis, Chione undatella, and Tivela stultorum (Figure 3A–D)
Summary
The Watts Towers (WT), known as Nuestro Pueblo, or the Towers of Simon Rodia, is an assemblage of numerous interconnected structures built by Italian immigrant Sabato Rodia between 1921 and 1954, in the Watts area of Los Angeles. The structures are built of steel elements (rods and pipes), which were wrapped with wire mesh and coated with a thin layer of mortar. In 1954, after more than 30 years of work on the structures, Rodia deeded the site to a neighbor and moved north to the San Francisco Bay Area. The subsequent dramatic history of the WT— which included a successful community campaign to block the City of Los Angeles’ demolition order in 1959— is documented in numerous sources (Whiteson 1989; Goldstone and Goldstone 1997; Herr 2014; Morgan 2014)
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