So a few weeks ago my twin Val came to visit for the weekend and we decided to take a drive to Homestead, Fl to visit one of the National Historic Places, Coral Castle. We didn't know what to expect, and we wee shocked at how something like this was built.
Coral Castle doesn't look much like a castle, but that hasn't discouraged generations of tourists from wanting to see it. That's because it was built by one man, Ed Leedskalnin, a Latvian immigrant who single-handedly and mysteriously excavated, carved, and erected over 2.2 million pounds of coral rock to build this place, even though he stood only five feet tall and weighed a mere 100 pounds.
Ed built his castle to impress Agnes Scuffs, a 16-year-old who had jilted him on the day before their wedding. Various explanations are given for her cold feet: Ed was too poor, too uneducated, too old. Maybe he was just too crazy. After all, Ed was a man who spent 20 years building an open-air compound stocked with lumpy rock tables, chairs, and beds, with no electricity or running water, and expected that Agnes would fall in love with it and with him. Billy Idol wrote and filmed the music video for "Sweet Sixteen" at CC based on this sad love story.
Ed was as secretive as he was misguided. He never told anyone how he carved and set into place the walls, gates, monoliths, and moon crescents that make up much of his Castle. Some of these blocks weigh as much as 30 tons. Ed often worked at night, by lantern light, so that no one could see him. He used only tools that he fashioned himself from wrecks in an auto junkyard. The largest stone weighs 30 tons and the tallest stones are two monolithic stones standing 25 ft high each.
A 9-ton revolving gate is the most famous structure of the castle - it is carved so precisely that it fits within a quarter of an inch of the walls on both sides. It was so well-balanced that a child could open it with the push of a single finger.
Ed died in 1951 and the castle has survived countless storms without a scratch, even Category 5 Hurricane Andrew. Crazy...
Above, called the Florida Table...can you guess why?
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