In 1881, a Philadelphia engineer named James Lafferty had a stretch of empty beachfront south of Atlantic City and a problem: nobody wanted to buy lots in the middle of nowhere. His solution was a 65-foot wooden elephant.
More than 140 years later, Lucy the Elephant is still standing in Margate, New Jersey.
The idea was to lure curious visitors, and with them buyers. Lafferty believed the “unusual structure” would “attract visitors and property buyers” to his holdings, according to the official Lucy history. The building first went by “Elephant Bazaar,” and a later owner, Sophia Gertzen, gave her the name Lucy.
The construction cost was first reported at $25,000, and Lafferty later said it reached $38,000, per the official history. He patented the design on Dec. 5, 1882, for a building shaped like an elephant, with stairs in the legs and a lookout on top called a howdah, the National Archives reported. Lafferty built three elephants, and only Lucy survives.
Over the years Lucy has served as a tavern, a summer cottage, a tourist camp, a boardinghouse, a hotel and a bathhouse, among other things, according to Ripley’s. By the 1960s she was rotting, and a developer was negotiating to buy the land beneath her, according to the official history.
That is when the neighbors stepped in. The Margate Civic Association formed the Save Lucy Committee in 1969, led by Edwin T. Carpenter, per the official history. Volunteers raised money through fundraisers and door-to-door canvassing, Ripley’s reported, and the plan was to move Lucy two blocks to city-owned parkland.
But, the move almost didn’t happen. Three days before the July 20, 1970 deadline, a neighboring property owner got an injunction, and Atlantic County Judge Benjamin Rimm held an unusual Saturday hearing and dissolved it. A small yellow pickup truck then towed the 90-ton, six-story elephant for about seven hours while crowds and TV crews watched.
“This is the most unusual moving job we have ever been asked to perform,” said project director Albert Ranalli. “The only thing that could equal it would be to move the Sphinx from the Valley of the Nile.”
Lucy has been drawing visitors ever since. She is “older than the Statue of Liberty,” Save Lucy Committee executive director Rich Helfant told 6abc. She is now a National Historic Landmark and has survived two direct lightning strikes, according to The Philadelphia Inquirer.
In 2023, Lucy booked a record 42,267 tours, topping the previous record set in 2018, according to WOBM. The Inquirer reports that more than 150,000 people visited her in 2024. Staffers even have a name for the window in her rear: the “pane in the butt.”
Lucy isn’t the only American attraction built to make people stop and look. She is one of the stops on a roundup of roadside attractions still worth pulling over for.
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