The Leaning Tower of Texas may not ring the same bell as Pisa’s more famous cousin, but out along the highways of the Texas Panhandle, there it stands—tilted, rusted, and proud—like a forgotten cowboy who refuses to straighten up for anyone.
Located just off I-40 in Groom, Texas, the Leaning Tower of Texas is actually an old water tower deliberately planted at a precarious angle by Ralph Britten in the 1980s to draw attention to his truck stop and tourist attraction. And draw attention it did. People slowed down. They stared. Some stopped, convinced it was mid-collapse. Others snapped photos, their own shadows long on the hot pavement. The truck stop burned down years ago, but the tower remains—defiantly askew and gloriously unnecessary.
It’s a piece of roadside theater, the kind that once defined American travel: kitsch and cleverness in equal measure. This isn’t a monument to architecture or balance. It’s a monument to marketing, to humor, and to the very human impulse to tilt the world just to see what happens.