Built From Broken Glass: The Science and Stubbornness of Saving America’s Folk Art Environments

Simon Rodia built the Watts Towers from scrap steel and seashells. Now engineers use lasers and tilt meters to keep them standing. Here’s how you save art that was never meant to last.

Full Episode Description

For 33 years, an Italian immigrant named Simon Rodia spent his nights and weekends walking railroad tracks near his home in Watts, California, dragging home scrap steel, old bedframes, and broken soda bottles. Without blueprints, scaffolding, or machinery, he built nine interconnected towers — the tallest reaching 99.5 feet.

The city of Los Angeles ordered them demolished. A crane applied 10,000 pounds of pressure trying to pull them down. The towers didn’t budge. The crane strained and failed.

But surviving a wrecking ball is not the same as surviving the elements. This episode follows the forensic engineering battle to keep the Watts Towers standing — including the discovery that the towers literally breathe, swaying an inch toward the sun each morning — and then travels 2,000 miles east to the Georgia pine forests, where a seven-acre psychedelic compound called Pasaquan was rescued from the vines by a foundation from Wisconsin.

We also visit the Art Preserve in Sheboygan — a 56,000-square-foot facility built specifically to house the salvaged remnants of lost folk art environments.

Topics Covered

• Simon Rodia and the 33-year construction of the Watts Towers
• The 1959 crane stress test that saved the towers from demolition
• How daily thermal cycling causes the towers to breathe — and crack
• Elastomeric crack fillers, migrating corrosion inhibitors, and dynamic conservation
• Eddie Owens Martin’s Pasaquan and the Kohler Foundation rescue
• The Art Preserve in Sheboygan and the challenge of salvaging dismantled environments
• Why preserving folk art requires different tools than preserving conventional historic structures

Tags / Keywords

folk art preservation, Watts Towers, Pasaquan, art environments, outsider art, historic preservation, Simon Rodia, Eddie Owens Martin, Kohler Foundation, Art Preserve, conservation science, Georgia folk art, Postmodern Gypsy, Jordan Poole, Howard Finster