The Towers of Watts

[davemarc]

>From Thomas Pynchon's "A Journey Into the Mind of Watts" (The New York Times
Magazine, 196something):

A kid could come along in his bare feet and step on this [broken] glass--not
that you'd ever know.  These kids are so tough you can pull slivers of it
out of them and never get a whimper.  It's part of their landscape, both the
real and the emotional one:  busted glass, busted crockery, nails, tin cans,
all kinds of scrap and waste.  Traditionally Watts.  An Italian immigrant
named Simon Rodia spent 30 years gathering some of it up and converting a
little piece of the neighborhood along 107th Street into the famous Watts
Towers, perhaps his own dream of how things should have been:  a fantasy of
fountains, boats, tall openwork spires, encrusted with a dazzling mosaic of
Watts debris.  Next to the Towers, along the old Pacific Electric tracks,
kids are busy every day busting more bottles on the steel rails.  But Simon
Rodia is dead, and now the junk just accumulates.