Simon Rodia, an Italian immigrant labourer, spent more than thirty years building a cluster of tall, lacy spires in his back yard in Watts, using steel rods, mortar and fragments of broken pottery, glass and seashells. The Watts Towers, finished in the 1950s, are one of the great works of folk art in America, and they stand a short ride east of this finish, in a neighbourhood of small houses and palm trees.
This finish lies in South Los Angeles, near Westmont and Willowbrook, a district of small houses, churches and busy boulevards, between the I-110 and I-105 freeways. Inglewood, to the west, has been transformed by SoFi Stadium, a huge new stadium for the Rams and the Chargers, and the area around it is being redeveloped.
Coming back from the Malibu canyons and Mulholland Drive, the final stretch crosses Los Angeles on the freeways, and the traffic can be brutal. California was the first state to make lane splitting explicitly legal, and local riders filter through the stopped freeway traffic as a matter of course. If you join them, keep the speed difference small, stay out of the way of the faster splitters, and watch for drivers who change lanes without looking, which is most of them at some point.
The neighbourhood itself is unpretentious, but it feeds you well. The taco trucks that park along the boulevards in the evening, and the small family restaurants behind faded signs, serve food that many Angelenos would put above anything in Beverly Hills. Fuel is never far away; the trick is to pick a station on a main road and avoid the freeway exits at rush hour.
If you have time before dark, the detour to the Watts Towers is short and genuinely moving: a man, his hands and three decades of stubbornness, standing among the bungalows.