A tower made of pallets

LAWRENCE K. HO / LA TIMES Van Meter's relatives want the tower to be demolished so a developer can build apartments. Van Meter built the tower in 1951, when he was in his late 30s, stacking the pallets in concentric circles until he had built a cone 22 feet high with a staircase winding around the outside. In those days, Van Meter's creation was one of the higher points in the San Fernando Valley. He would climb up and gaze at the orchards and fields as they yielded to the relentless advance of subdivisions. "To me, this is a spiritual place," he once said.

Van Meter, who supported himself with odd jobs, never married and left no descendants. Instead, he collected castoffs wooden wagons, junked cars, a 1938 city bus, a turret from a battleship, a boat, a gasoline pump and a kitchen sink all of which shared space on his property with goats, dogs, cats, chickens, turtles and raccoons. His weed-choked lot harbors the detritus of a century of San Fernando Valley history, with the tower looming in the background like a ruined Mayan temple. In front, Van Meter's wrecked house leans like a boxer in midfall.

In 1977, fire inspectors declared the tower "an illegally stacked lumber pile" and ordered Van Meter to tear it down. He refused. Instead, he persuaded the Cultural Heritage Commission to declare it a monument. Shortly after Van Meter's death, his heirs reached an agreement with a developer, Westgate Group of Los Angeles, to build apartments on the lot. The developer obtained a demolition permit in 2003 and sent a bulldozer. Workers had begun to knock down Van Meter's house when the city planning department realized there was a problem: the monument.

The department ordered Westgate Group to pay for a historical and artistic analysis of Van Meter's tower as part of an environmental-impact report on the development. The draft report concluded the tower was "not significant" as a historical work and "does not demonstrate the inventiveness associated with outsider art." Westgate recently reached a compromise with many of the neighbors, agreeing to add parking spaces and redesign the complex's window placements. With that agreement, an ending that Van Meter anticipated in 1978 could be imminent. "In a few years," he wrote then, "this piece of the good earth may be covered by apartments for the storing of surplus people."