Coral Castle
— — a wall one man cut out of the reef.
Not only on a wall.
“Edward Leedskalnin worked for twenty-eight years, alone and at night, cutting more than eleven hundred tons of coral limestone into chairs, beds, a sundial, and a nine-ton gate that pivoted on a truck bearing. He weighed a hundred pounds. He never told anyone how he moved the blocks. He said only that he had figured out how the Egyptians did it.
Coral Castle, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
Coral Castle sits on US Route 1 in Homestead, Florida, about forty-five kilometres south of downtown Miami. Edward Leedskalnin, a Latvian immigrant who stood about 1.5 metres tall and weighed roughly 45 kilograms, built the complex between 1923 and 1951 — first at Florida City, then moved block by block to the present site beginning in 1936. The site was added to the U.S. National Register of Historic Places in 1984. It opens daily as a small private museum about an acre and a half in size.
The blocks are oolite limestone — a soft, porous coral-derived rock that quarries easily from the Florida bedrock and hardens on exposure to air. Leedskalnin cut more than 1,100 tons of stone using hand tools fashioned from junked car parts and railway scraps. The largest single piece weighs about 30 tons. A nine-ton gate, balanced on a truck bearing centred in a drilled shaft, could be pushed open with one finger until the bearing seized in 1986 and was rebuilt by engineers from a local college.
The museum opens daily from about 9 a.m. to 6 p.m., with shorter hours on Sundays. Admission runs around 18 dollars for adults; guided tours are included and run roughly every half hour. The grounds cover about an acre and a half — the throne room, the polaris telescope, the sundial, the nine-ton gate, and the bedroom with stone children's beds. The Miami-Dade Transit Busway runs a stop within a short walk for visitors arriving without a car.