A Latvian man built a castle. By himself.
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It was meant as a monument to his lost love, his ”˜Sweet Sixteen.’ Lovelorn in his native Latvia, Edward Leedskalnin fled for Florida, where he spent the next thirty years, building. He worked for most of every day, subsisting mostly on sardines and crackers. In his spare time, he studied magnetic currents.
Astronomical motifs – crescent moons, planets, etc. – festoon the grounds. The ”˜Coral Castle’ has heart-shaped tables, multi-ton rocking chairs, and ramparts several feet thick. And one of the main doors – weighing several tons – is so perfectly balanced that it opens with the push of a finger.
No one ever saw Ed at work. Engineers, let alone the lay public, are a mite confused about how a five feet man lugged over a thousand tons of coral. When asked, he simply said he knew the principles of leverage pretty well. And as for carving it? Coral has been known to break the tools of jewelers.