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Animated Meat

Junk Drawer of the Universe
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  • Product Reviews
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As some of you may remember, Animated Meat first came to life in 2008 as a way to document some sights that managed to slip through the cracks of most popular travel websites.  You may also remember that the original website was built on Apple's now defunct iWeb.  From there, it migrated over to WordPress where it met an untimely demise at the hands of Russian hackers.  Many of those old, pre-2012 entries have found a new home here in the Classics section.  I would consider these posts as my starting place as a writer, probably comparable to a musician's first demo tapes.  They are very rough, but I took them all seriously and wrote each one with passion.  While I would like to believe that I have matured in my abilities as a writer, it is my hope that I carry this same blind passion into all of my new efforts.

Sign

The Coral Castle - Originally Published 2011

July 21, 2018

Love can make men do some pretty crazy things.  Ed Leedskalnin’s personal brand of love-crazy would have to be a bit more extreme than most folks.

Entrance
Mai at the gate

The Isley Brothers and Michael Bolton agree on exactly three things, one of them being that love is a wonderful thing.  Love, as wonderful as it may be, has been known to make a fellow do some strange things.  It drove Menelaus to launch a campaign against the Trojans that lasted ten years.  Love was why Lloyd Dobler held that boom box up outside of Diane Court’s house that one night.  Love also was the reason why Ed Leedskalnin left his native Latvia and built the Coral Castle in Florida.

Chairs
Meat at coral castle

Who is Ed Leedskalnin?  He was a pretty unassuming immigrant that arrived on the shores of the US shortly after being jilted the day before his wedding.  His master plan for winning her back was to build a house completely out of fossilized coral.  With no machine tools.  And no help.  By the way, he was only 5’ tall, 100 pounds, and had suffered through a bout of tuberculosis.

Florida table

Allow me to quantify his accomplishment for those of you without a degree in Construction Science.  One cubic foot of coral weighs 125 pounds.  Just one section of the wall around his castle is eight feet tall, four feet wide, and three feet thick which would make them about 12,000 pounds each.  Remember, the guy was consumptive.

Astronomical

So how did he do it?  That’s the best part.  No one knows.  As the story goes, he did it completely on his own and no one ever witnessed him work on it.

Family room

The Castle seems to be equal parts observatory and love letter to Ed’s Sweet Sixteen.  I found that one minute I was trying to get my head wrapped around the fact that the stones weren’t randomly positioned, two of them allowed Ed to track Polaris.  The next, I was looking at something like The Bedroom, the group of stones to the right.  Count them, three beds.  One for the husband, one for the wife, and one in the back for a baby.

Heart table
View from up top

If you do plan to visit the Coral Castle, I recommend doing a little background research on it first.  It takes up about an acre and it’s possible to run through it quickly without really looking at it and seeing some of the finer points.  If you watch some of this clip, you’ll see the stone that Mai is pushing.  We missed out on that “balance” thing they do in the clip*.  

Mai pushing coral
Another view

*Note - I could not find the clip that I referenced in the original publication - Ed.

In travel Tags florida, coral castle, ed leedskalnin, sweet sixteen, outsider art, coral, unsolved mystery, polaris, love, miami, southern, consumptive, tuberculosis, jilted lover, menelaus, lloyd dobler, diane court, in seach of, animated meat, ed richter, united states, roadside attraction
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