FORTEAN PHENOMENA

Florida history: What’s behind the mystery of Coral Castle?

Eliot Kleinberg
Sun, November 21, 2021

In June 2019, we visited the assault on South Florida by Category 5 Hurricane Andrew. Homes were leveled, down to the slab. Cars were turned upside down. Sailboats were flung into trees.

Down in southern Miami-Dade County, one place was unscathed – thus increasing the mystery of Coral Castle. Here’s more from a 1994 feature.

The storm did collapse the roof of the attraction’s gift shop. But not the rest of Edward Leedskalnin’s baffling legacy.

Coral Castle: A fanciful myth?

If winds estimated to have gusted at up to 200 mph could not budge the 1,100 tons of Florida coral – in pieces ranging in size from 6 tons to 30 tons – how did a 5-foot, 100-pound man lift and position them? Decades after his feat, no one has yet come up with answers.

Leedskalnin did not say; the Latvian immigrant worked in obscurity and died the same way in 1951. The attraction was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1984.

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His works exalt various scientific laws, Florida, the family, and a lost love.

Leedskalnin carved and sculpted using only handmade pulleys and levers salvaged from car and railroad junkyards. He claimed he employed the long-lost secrets of the Pyramids.

Coral Castle is a sculpture garden near Homestead. From 1923 to 1951, Edward Leedskalnin single-handedly carved more than 1,100 tons of coral rock.

The works of Edward Leedskalnin

Among his creations:

• A 9-ton gate that swings opens with the touch of a finger.

• A table in the shape of Florida; the geographically correct, 8-inch indentation representing Lake Okeechobee is kept filled with water.

• A 20-ton, 20-foot-tall telescope with a circular cutout that constantly points to the North Star.

• A sundial that tells time and indicates equinox and solstice days.

• The “throne room,”' a collection of several chairs. In one, called the “mad rocker,” two people sit facing each other and rock. Another, called the “mother-in-law” chair, is identified as the most uncomfortable one.

• The “world’s largest valentine” – a 2½-ton heart-shaped table with benches said to honor the fiancee who jilted him back in Latvia around 1915. Deciding the 27-year-old Leedskalnin was too old for her, the 16-year-old girl had broken up with him the night they were to marry.

Heartbroken, he roamed through Canada, Washington state and California before ending up in Florida City, in what then was the frontier of sparsely populated South Florida. He opened his attraction to the public in 1920 as “Ed's Place.” It’s mentioned in the classic 1939 WPA Guide to Florida, which we covered in a February 2020 column.

In 1939, opting for greater visibility along U.S. 1 and fortune that was never to materialize, Leedskalnin moved his entire inventory to its present location. Borrowing a mule and a wagon, Leedskalnin hauled the colossal carvings 10 miles and set them in place.

Again, no one knows how he did it.

Florida Time is a weekly column about Florida history by Eliot Kleinberg, a former staff writer for three decades at The Palm Beach Post in West Palm Beach, and the author of 10 books about Florida (www.ekfla.com).

This article originally appeared on Palm Beach Post: Coral Castle: A mysterious attraction built as a monument to lost love