Developers were building a subdivision near his property, so Leedskalnin bought 10 acres in nearby Homestead to get away. The gate broke again in 2005, and even with today’s technology, it has never quite worked as smoothly as it had when Leedskalnin built it.Įven more amazing is that Leedskalnin moved the whole kit and kaboodle-by himself-beginning in 1936. When the bearing began to rust and had to be replaced in 1986, it took a team of six men and a 50-ton crane to remove the stone. At one time the stone was so precisely balanced on an old truck bearing that it was said a child could spin the gate around with just a finger. The highlight of this spectacle, though, is a nine-ton, eight-foot tall revolving stone gate set between two segments of the wall with only a quarter inch of clearance on either side. In the garden, he built a variety of sculptures, including two 25-foot tall, 28-ton obelisks, and a massive 30-ton rock that has additional decorative stones on the top, eight feet off the ground. Leedskalnin lived on the second floor, which he furnished with hand carved stone tables, chairs, and a bathtub. In addition, the wall also contains a two-story tower built from blocks that average about nine tons each, for a total of 240 tons. No matter how he did it, though, it’s still a pretty amazing feat for a single man to build an eight-foot tall fence around 10 acres of land using stones four feet wide, three feet thick, and weighing more than 55 tons each. More rational minds think a tripod made of telephone poles and a block-and-tackle pulley system, that’s been seen in photographs, is the more likely method. Some neighborhood snoopers claim to have seen Leedskalnin lay his hands on a block of stone and chant a mysterious incantation, which caused the rock to float in the air. Just how he was able to do all of this work by himself using only basic hand tools is a bit of a mystery he intentionally worked late at night under the cover of darkness to hide his techniques. When he’d recovered, Leedskalnin used the skills he learned coming from a family of stonemasons to quarry, carve, and set huge slabs of oolite limestone-a form of sedimentary rock that often contains small pieces of fossilized shells and coral-all over his property. Heartbroken, Leedskalnin traveled to North America, spending time in Canada, California, and Texas before finally settling in Florida City, Florida in 1918 after coming down with tuberculosis. The Castle-which is located in Homestead, just outside of Miami-is the obsessive work of Edward Leedskalnin, a Latvian immigrant who spent nearly 30 years building this monument in stone for his “Sweet Sixteen” fiancée, a young woman who jilted him the night before their wedding day.
Florida’s Coral Castle has been called the American Stonehenge, but a more apt comparison might be the Taj Mahal.
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