The name “Coral Castle” was given to the park in the 1950s.īecause 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. Floridians traverse a wet, aquatic history with every footstep. 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.
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.
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