About the Watts Towers
To friends of Rodia's Towers in Watts,
The City Council member for Watts, Janice Hahn, is supporting an effort by sports business professionals to install a cement skateboard park to be located within less than half a block of the Towers. It would be called The Watts Towers Skateboard Park.
We ask you to contact Ms. Hahn with your protest against this intrusive, inappropriate effort. The Towers and the Towers Campus offer the only cultural resource in Watts that is free of gang warfare and commercial operations. We battle to keep it that way.
The cultural legacy of this National Historic Landmark which welcomes thousands of international and local visitors every year will be damaged irremediably by the noise and tumult of a skateboard park.
Visitors who love Rodia's Towers will wonder at the ignorance of a City which would permit such an invasion directly next to Rodia's masterwork, a paramount work of 20th century art in the United States and a beloved artistic asset.
Furthermore the area the skateboarders insist on occupying is one of the few places where a green spot can be developed to complement and enhance the Towers experience for visitors and the community. A small park is appropriate in the area east of the Towers, but a skateboard park, with its noisy, violent racket is not.
The skateboard group seems impervious to the rights of hundreds of neighbors (on East 107th and 108th Streets) directly surrounding the proposed area whose peace and quiet would be destroyed as skateboard parks traditionally operate during both day and evening hours. A more appropriate venue can be found if Ms. Hahn merely changes her point of view.
Please let Councilmember Janice Hahn know that her support of the skateboard park degrades the Towers and insults their international status as a world class cultural treasure: councilmember.hahn@lacity.org
Jeanne S. Morgan, Chair
Committee for Simon Rodia's Towers in Watts
(Guardians since 1958) 812 West Figueroa Street
Santa Barbara, CA 93101
jsmorgan@mailstation.com
