American Royalty: Solomon's Castle, Ona, FL

For the average Florida tourist, the only castle on the peninsula belongs to Cinderella. Roughly a hundred miles from the calculated splendor of Disney World, off unpaved country roads, past a group of vultures snacking on a deer carcass, where cell reception goes black, is another palace, made entirely from repurposed junk.

To twist the old adage, one man’s trash is definitely still another man’s treasure - bringing us to Solomon’s Castle, one of the places that helped inspire the American Weirdness project back in the autumn of 2012.

Howard Solomon is the king of this castle, though he opts for a skipper’s hat rather than a crown. He moved to the central Florida property in 1972, having bought it on the cheap. With the first late-summer rains, Solomon realized he had scored a massive deal on acres of mosquito-infested swampland. He began construction on his regal residence that year, transforming the waterlogged acres into a recycled wonderland. It withstood hurricanes Charley, Jeanne, and Frances, which all tore through Ona, ripping out groves of old oak trees but leaving the castle unharmed. Now in his late 70’s, Solomon presides over a massive kingdom, one both unique and ever-expanding.

The castle features over 90 hand-made, stained-glass windows, depicting images of nursery rhymes, zodiac symbols, and the planets. The exterior panels are made of a holographic metal that changes colors in the sunlight. A black and white knight stand watch at either side of the entrance - Knight and Day.

While serving as a residence for Solomon and his wife, the castle is also a museum of his artwork, crafted entirely from found objects. He has used oil drums, beer cans, and failed appliances, even re-appropriating the cylinder of a Volkswagen Beetle into one of his sculptures. He made a menagerie of animals out of coat hangers, weighing nearly 50 pounds, and has crafted over 300 cars out of beer cans, the only project he says he doesn’t remember making. It took him over a year to gather the parts to create a steam engine that runs on a working Hoover vacuum motor. He made a carousel from old record players, complete with singing figurines in the style of “It’s a Small World After All.”

Our tour guide, a Vietnam War veteran, blessed with the quick rap of a vaudeville performer, took every opportunity to crack jokes about the sculptures and their pun-filled monikers. He stopped beside a six-foot-long metal Lion named Lionel, quipping “Lionel has two glass eyes and two steal balls.” The “Lorena Bobbitt” shotgun has a knife attached, to keep fidelity in check, and the “Mother-in-Law” clock, which runs backwards with the three on the left and the nine on the right.

Between 1990 and 1994, Solomon built the Boat in the Moat, called the Santa Maria, a restaurant run by Princess Solomon and her husband that serves country-style lunch fare. Two years ago, Solomon created the Alashmo, his version of the Alamo, right next door to his daughters home, which he also built himself, a deep brown stucco structure called The Chocolate House.

Remember the Alashmo. 

Lunch like a pirate.

King Solomon is never far from his castle, greeting visitors with a lissome grin and taking their tickets. It took a few minutes for us to even realize that he was the Solomon of Solomon’s Castle, taking a Saturday off from his workshop on the premises to man the register.

Solomon’s Castle is one of the most interesting pieces of living art in the cultural wasteland of Florida, made by a true, original Dadaist. If you’re not in love with paying $100 for the screaming, vomiting experience of Disney World to stand inside a castle, drive the 90 minutes to Ona to visit one created by a real artist for a mere $10.

Despite his age, Solomon assured that he plans to keep expanding and creating so long as he’s able.

“Some day,” he said. “The castle will be my kids problem.”

Art is Hard: The Salvador Dali Museum, St. Petersburg, FL

The Dali Museum, a grandiose hull of glass nodules and steel adjacent to a marina in St. Petersburg Florida. Only a few years old, the powers found it necessary to destroy the former Dali Museum in order to erect a new one, not for efficacy reasons but for aesthetics alone. Our friend Danielle with whom we were staying told us this trend is increasing along the waterfront to the point where locals have begun protesting the destruction and recreation of a shoreline site called The Pier, simply because some find it outdated, at the behest of taxpayer dollars and the possible malnourishment of the pelican population. Why fix what isn’t broken? Because we can afford it, goddamn it!

In the lobby of the museum sits a remake of Dali’s Rainy Taxi, which by the insertion of a dollar bill into a slot causes simulated rainwater to pour through the interior of the automobile, soaking both the molding mannequin in the backseat and the shark-headed chauffeur. The original exhibition included chicory plants and live snails which crawled across the plastic woman. Its pay-per-play remake did not.

Snails not included.

As a tribute to the artist who was quoted once admitting a love for everything gilded and excessive, the institution exists solely to serve to the upwardly mobile their monthly helping of culture, celebrating the depraved opulence of the allotted few and not the collection of one of the greatest creative minds of the 20th century. It is, as with the yacht club or the golf club, a place to be seen and to socialize, a spot to nibble on cheese plates and sip $7 glasses of low-rung wine at the commissary and not to engage in a sensory experience with the present art. They are shopping, plugged in to their headsets, their faces saying “This one would look lovely in the pool house. Do you think they take checks?”

The appeal exists because Dali’s work is different enough to earn culture points but not outwardly shocking enough to spark real, introspective thought among these people, fighting their twanging discomfort in front of a wall-length portrait mocking the crucifixion of Christ or a topless portrait of his wife and muse Gala at the kitchen table. Anything more intense and they would barf into their Hermes handbags.

Their mentality is disturbingly appropriate as the collection itself began as one of the largest, private collections of the artists’ work in the United States, owned by a big-money couple from St. Petersburg who began collecting in 1943. The now amassed 1,500 works consist of still lifes of fruit bowls and landscapes of the artists’ hometown from his early art school days and the extravagant, absurd masterpieces he labored over in the final years of his life.

The art is exquisite and it is striking to see his works in person, many of them taking on varying shapes and meanings when viewed from different distances and angles. The motifs running throughout - the silhouette of the Venus de Milo, Gala,  melting clocks and globes - are traceable when viewed as a massive, live portfolio, witnessing his transition from student to artist, discovering his sense of Surrealism around the time he met idol Pablo Picasso.

Migrating through the mingling browsers - if you have the stomach for snobbery - there’s something hysterical about people fantasizing about art they’ll never own or even really understand. They’re more interested in what’s in the gift shop and who’s at the snack bar, anyway. We cannot help but wonder what Dali would have thought of such a clash - the very people he sought to satirize and shake out of complacency, quietly gazing at his works as though they were at the Sistine Chapel. Would he love it? Would he hate it? The answer is not one or the other, nor does it lie somewhere in between. It is in fact a trick question: he would probably pull the fire alarm and wait outside to spray patrons with a hose.