Men spent six months merely unpacking 36.000 Piece by piece, "world's biggest jigsaw puz- Completed, ancient Spanish monastery is authentic
stones trom crates before reassemhlu rnnU lo" ,1... ,4. ..t l -t r r .l. um h a .
k r 1 1 ' '""i jiuiicnimuni pui eacn none segment ot curope ot me rviiacue ges, set down ir
beg.n. borted stones spread over 10 acres. ip place by tedious "test-and-fif . method. midst of the South of twentieth-century America
in
: x. - -x x.; am x w
i I.
2,000,000 ligsaw Puzzle
FEW miles from
glittering Miami
Beach stands the
oldest building in North
America a transplanted
12th-century monastery
originally built in Spain.
How it got there is a
story of the world's
biggest and most com
plicated jigsaw puzzle.
The monastery was
bought in the 1920s by
publisher William Ran
dolph Hearst for $500,000.
Hearst had it dismantled,
intending to rebuild it on
his San Simeon, Calif.,
estate. But he never got
around to it, and the
dismantled building lay
in storage for 25 years.
Several years ago, two
real estate men bought
the building. When they
shipped it to Florida, they
found to their consterna
tion that the intricate
numbering system for re
assembling the monastery
had been all but de
stroyed. They unpacked
36,000 stones from 10,751
crates and ended with a
:,.xi-ton jig-saw puzzle
strewn over 10 acres.
But they persisted. Ex
pert stonemasons sjicnt 10
montlw fitting the pieres
together fit a cost of
$1.A,0OQ. TMay, thou
sands of tourists ittU
through the same halls
where Cisrcian motfa
prayed 800 years ago.
D d
;XX; X-KJS PXX?vt-3 Tffl
fc&VrV -. ;X J-sPS& $XXX -M
r
-,fZ.I v X ;X- :X: X'f : -: -; ' L
vt. 4 : ' - X'-
" .' 'X?XL v ' .1 Jr ' :
Familw VV'rrlcly, Drrombcr i, I9i7
O
O
Q
O