A memorial to lost love
From 1923 until his death in 1951, a single man quarried and carved over 1,100 tons of rock into a sprawling complex of furniture, sculptures, and walls. The builder, Edward Leedskalnin, was a Latvian immigrant who stood just over five feet tall and weighed around 120 pounds. He claimed the entire project was a gift for a lost love, a woman he called his "Sweet Sixteen" who had cancelled their wedding one day before the ceremony in his home country.
The structure is built from oolitic limestone, a sedimentary rock often called "coral rock" because it contains fossilized shells and coral fragments. Leedskalnin quarried all the stone on-site, first in Florida City and later at its current location in Homestead, Florida. He worked almost exclusively at night, by lantern light, allowing no one to watch him. This secrecy has led to decades of speculation about his methods. The stones are set together without mortar, using their immense weight and precise fitting to stay in place so accurately that no light passes through the joints. In 1936, Leedskalnin moved the entire original structure 10 miles from Florida City to Homestead, loading and unloading the multi-ton blocks by himself.
An unsolved engineering puzzle
The castle's features are hard to explain. One of its most famous elements was a nine-ton gate, so perfectly balanced that a child could move it with a single finger. The gate revolved on a metal shaft resting on an old truck bearing. When it stopped working in 1986, it required six men and a 50-ton crane to remove it for repairs. The engineers who fixed it discovered how Leedskalnin achieved the feat, yet the ease of the original movement is still impressive.
Among the other structures are 25-foot-tall monoliths, solid stone rocking chairs that move with a gentle push, a bathtub, and celestial objects like crescent moons and planets. A 25-foot-high Polaris telescope, weighing an estimated 20 tons, is aligned with the North Star. Leedskalnin used simple, handmade tools, including tripods made from old telephone poles and a system of pulleys and chains. When asked about his techniques, he claimed he knew the secrets used to build the ancient pyramids. He also wrote pamphlets on his theories of magnetism, but his exact methods for lifting and positioning stones weighing up to 30 tons are still not fully understood.