A hundred years ago, in what was then the semi-rural farming community of Watts, a 40ish-year-old Italian immigrant laborer named Sabato Rodia bought a little home on a dead-end block by the railroad tracks and started collecting junk. The roar and rattle of Pacific Electric Railway red cars was almost constant, but that didn’t bother Rodia.

Perhaps he was already envisioning what would become National Historic Landmark No. 77000297, casting its otherworldly spell on such admirers as Charles Mingus, Betye Saar, Buckminster Fuller and Nipsey Hussle. The train traffic might have annoyed Rodia’s wife, but it gave him a daily audience for the building of the wonder we know now as Watts Towers.