The Towers of Watts w/date

[davemarc]

>Date: Tue, 19 Mar 1996 01:14:42
>To: Pynchlist
>From: davemarc <davemarc at panix.com>
>Subject: The Towers of Watts
>
>From Thomas Pynchon's "A Journey Into the Mind of Watts" (The New York
Times Magazine, 196something):

Okay, foax.  It's from the June 12, 1966 issue.
>
>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.
>