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Ed Leedskalnin was a little guy who was chronically ill. But in 1923, he took 2.2 million pounds of Florida limestone — some chunks as big as 10 tons — and built a castle. How did he do that? Was it magic? Manipulation of gravity? Help from aliens? Or was it the power of a broken heart? Story and photographs by Monica Uszerowicz They call Florida the Sunshine State. They should probably call it the Limestone State, because that’s what Florida is made of: porous limestone, itself composed partly of mollusks and corals — their dried, skeletal remains.I am the only native Floridian in my family, and this is my favorite thing about Florida: that it’s a sponge made of dead things. Floridians traverse a wet, aquatic history with every footstep. We walk on a cemetery of sea life. I don’t know if Edward “Ed” Leeskalnin considered the poetics of this metaphor, but he unwittingly embodied it when he built Coral Castle in 1923. Ed, who was reportedly 5 feet tall, 129 pounds, and chronically sick with a respiratory illness, alone took 2.2 million pounds of limestone and built a giant, megalithic “castle” of a dollhouse. Every piece is limestone: curved crescent moons, towering planets, beds, rocking chairs, tables, star-shaped fountains, a functional sundial, all carved from that brittle, bone-encrusted rock, painful to the touch when it’s sun-starched. Together, the stones total 1,110 tons — including a 9-ton gate, 5.8-ton walls, a 28-ton obelisk — quarried, shaped, and erected by one small, ill man. Ed built Coral Castle in Florida City, where it was named Ed’s Place, then Rock Gate; he later picked it all up, miraculously, and moved it 2.5 miles north to Homestead. The name “Coral Castle” was given to the park in the 1950s. Because the roadside tourist attraction is made from the geological stuff that forms the state’s bedrock, it seems to have sprung forth from the ground organically, like a volcano, or spectrally, a ghost from her grave. I’ve only been to Coral Castle three times, because the trip is long and the entry fee isn’t cheap. You want it to be big, but you’ll traverse its entirety in a few minutes, and the flora that sneaks through the cracks in the coral — pink bougainvillea, birds of paradise — is the same sort that grows in your backyard. Florida is weird already, so the place doesn’t flabbergast.It’s all the questions — and uncertain answers — about how Coral Castle was built that render it a mystery.Nobody is sure how Ed lifted the rocks and seamlessly nestled them together. (He even fashioned two doors, one 3 tons and the other 9 tons, that still rotate with a light push, balanced on their centers of gravity with small, moving ball bearings.) But people love to guess. There are scads of biographies and conspiracy theories on the subject, bestrewn across the internet from corner to psyched-out corner, all with their own ideas: Ed sang to the rocks till they levitated; he received extraterrestrial support; he “used magnetism.” When strangers enquired how he did it, he’d say he had studied how the ancient Egyptian pyramids were built. But those daunting structures seem a bad comparison: Their blocks weighed 2.5 tons each. Ed worked alone, under no threat, somehow lifting 10-ton rocks with a tripod made of three pieces of Dade County pine. In Florida, it’s hard to forget who and what came first, who cultivated the swamps, who took it all away. America is a dubious narrative; Florida a sticky early chapter. There was never a fountain of youth, only the awful, myth-making hunger of colonizers, and a territory better occupied and cared for by the Tequesta tribe. Still, strange stories persist here, get etched into its substratum. There are few confirmable “facts” about Coral Castle’s history. It is a place devoid of verisimilitude, as if Ed somehow worked with the cosmos to give the place its own gravitational pull, so that all its truths push toward opposing rebuttals. Attempts to elucidate the mystery draw their own criticisms, which is precisely the point. Ed likely wanted it mysterious. The rest of us do, too. It gives us something to prod at, something that aligns with the weird-Florida narrative. When I first visited Coral Castle, a guide said, “Now, I know you all think Ed used magic to build this place, but he didn’t.” I left the tour. Why debunk a good thing?But no matter how Ed built it, Coral Castle tour guides and all the associated ephemera will have you believe it’s one thing above all others: a monument to a broken heart. Gave my heart an engagement ringShe took everythingEverything I gave herOh sweet sixteenBuilt a moonFor a rocking chairI never guessed it wouldRock her far from here— "Sweet Sixteen," Billy Idol, 1986 During the first eight seconds of Billy Idol’s video for “Sweet Sixteen,” there’s a still image of a tuxedoed man standing among Coral Castle's stone statues; they engulf him like a sea. Cursive text appears on a tilted axis, postcard-style: “Love Turned to Stone.” The pictur...

Coral Castle — THE BITTER SOUTHERNER