In 1951, Van Meter found thousands of discarded standard pallets from a local Schlitz Brewing Company plant. This gave him the idea of building some sort of structure from these. He gathered up five truckloads of these discarded pallets and began building a tower structure in his backyard. The bee hive cone-shaped tower of some 2000 wooden pallets had a base of and ultimately rose to over twenty feet in height when finished. Van Meter's Tower of Pallets sat on the gravesite of a child buried in 1869. It took Van Meter several weeks to build the wooden tower of pallets. The top had an opening that was thirteen feet across. The "room" inside contained outdoor patio furniture. In 1953, Los Angeles county building inspectors were baffled as to how to classify Van Meter's innovation. They ultimately decided it was a wooden "fence". No further regulatory action was taken for over twenty years and the building department left him alone, along with his "folk art" innovation, until 1977. In that year the cityfire department declared his creation "an illegally stacked lumber pile." He was instructed to tear it down. Van Meter, using some imagination, convinced the Cultural Heritage Commission and the city of Los Angeles to designate his creation a Historic Cultural Monument. It was declared then as HCM Monument No. 184 in 1978. This designation protected Van Meter's pile of pallets until he died or moved. Later, then-commissioner Robert W. Winter said "maybe we were drunk" when the pile was designated a monument for Van Meter's lifetime. Winter said it was the funniest thing they ever did. Van Meter lived to be 87 years old and died in 1998. Some say Van Meter's tower of wooden pallets was one of a kind and consider him an "outside artist." In 2006 the remainder of the Tower of Pallets was bulldozed. Van Meter's heirs sold the underlying land for $4.5 million; a 98-unit multi-level apartment building was built in the tower's place. Supposedly, there will be a memorial display of the Tower of Pallets in the lobby of the apartment building. Van Meter was quoted as saying when he lobbied for his tower’s landmark status:
