The Man Who Buried His Car

Sabato Rodia stood four feet ten inches tall and could bend steel rebar with his bare hands. For thirty-three years, the Italian-born tile mason built seventeen interconnected towers in his backyard in Watts, the tallest reaching ninety-nine feet. Twenty times his own height. No scaffolding, no machinery, no blueprints.

He also buried a car in his yard.

Rodia walked up to twenty miles a day along railroad tracks, collecting broken bottles, ceramic tiles, seashells, scrap metal. He bent steel beams by wedging them against the railroad tracks. He pressed tens of thousands of fragments into wet concrete until his fingerprints wore away completely. He slept four or five hours a night for three decades, building by the light of a miner's headlamp. He bathed once a month in rubbing alcohol.

There is a particular kind of person who, when the police come asking about an illegally modified 1927 Hudson with a police siren bolted to the roof, looks the officer in the eye and denies owning a car. One respects this. Rodia buried the Hudson next to the towers. It was found in 1998, a bottle of liquor still inside.

He called the whole complex Nuestro Pueblo. Our Town. Not in English or Italian, but in the Spanish of his neighbors.

In 1955, after thirty-three years of work, Rodia deeded the property to the man next door, walked to the bus station, and never came back. When someone later showed him photographs of Gaudi's Sagrada Familia, he studied them carefully. "Did he have helpers?" Rodia asked. Then: "I did it myself."