America’s oldest roadside attraction is an elephant standing on a beach in Margate City, NJ

She’s America’s oldest roadside attraction

There is a six-story elephant standing on the beach in Margate City, New Jersey, and she has been there since before anyone alive today was born.

Her name is Lucy, she stands 65 feet tall, and she weighs about 90 tons.

You can walk inside her leg, climb a spiral staircase through her body, and stand on her back looking out at the Atlantic Ocean. Over 150,000 people a year come to do exactly that.

The story of how she got here, and how she almost didn’t survive, is the part worth knowing.

Lafferty’s wild real estate scheme actually worked

James V. Lafferty was a Philadelphia developer with a problem: nobody wanted to buy land on a bare stretch of New Jersey beach in 1881. His solution was to build a six-story elephant.

He would bring potential buyers up to the platform on the elephant’s back and point out the land parcels below.

It worked well enough that in 1882, he patented the concept of animal-shaped buildings, giving him the exclusive right to build them for 17 years. He built three elephants in total.

Lucy is the only one left.

The Coney Island and Cape May elephants are both gone

Lafferty’s other two elephant buildings didn’t make it. The one he built in Coney Island burned down in 1896.

The one in Cape May was demolished in 1900. That leaves Lucy as the only surviving example of 19th-century zoomorphic architecture in the United States, which is the formal term for buildings shaped like animals.

She’s not just a roadside oddity. She is, as far as historians know, the last one of her kind on the continent.

She went from real estate office to tavern to summer cottage

After Lafferty sold her, Lucy spent decades changing hands and changing uses.

At different points, she served as a real estate office, a tavern, a business office, a restaurant, and a summer cottage. The tavern years came to an end during Prohibition.

The Gertzen family of Philadelphia owned her from 1887 until 1970, and it was a Gertzen daughter-in-law who gave the elephant her name around 1902.

For years, Lucy appeared on souvenir postcards under the name “The Elephant Hotel of Atlantic City.”

In 1969, she had 30 days to survive or be torn down

By the 1960s, Lucy had fallen badly into disrepair and the city scheduled her for demolition. A group of local residents formed the Save Lucy Committee in 1969.

They had 30 days to either move the 90-ton structure or pay for its destruction. Volunteers went door to door collecting money.

On July 20, 1970, Lucy was moved about 100 yards to a city-owned lot in a seven-hour operation filmed for the Historic American Buildings Survey.

The whole thing became a model for preservation efforts nationwide.

Steel replaced wood, and Lucy reopened after 12 years dark

Once workers got her to the new lot, they reinforced her original wood frame with steel and built a new howdah, the riding platform on her back. She had been closed since 1962.

She reopened to the public in 1974. Two years later, during the nation’s Bicentennial, the federal government designated her a National Historic Landmark as the oldest surviving example of zoomorphic architecture in America.

In 2012, Hurricane Sandy’s storm surge reached her feet. She didn’t move.

A $2.4 million restoration gave Lucy new skin in 2022

A major exterior restoration wrapped up in late 2022, replacing deteriorated tin sheeting and repairing the wooden frame underneath.

Lucy is made from nearly one million pieces of wood covered in tin, so keeping that structure sound takes real money and real work. The restoration cost $2.4 million.

USA Today readers voted her the No. 1 Best Roadside Attraction in the country in both 2024 and 2025. After nearly 145 years, she keeps drawing people who want to see something they’ve never seen before.

Climb her spiral staircase and look out through her eyes

Guided tours run every 45 minutes and take about 20 to 25 minutes from start to finish. You enter through a door in one of Lucy’s hind legs, then climb a spiral staircase that winds up through her body.

Inside, you watch a short video on her history, see artifacts and fabric samples from her original construction, and look out through Lucy’s eyes at the street below.

The tour ends on the howdah, the open-air platform on her back, where Lafferty once pitched real estate deals to potential buyers.

The view from her back covers three directions at once

Standing on the howdah, you get a 360-degree look at everything around you: the Atlantic Ocean to the east, Margate’s beachfront stretching in both directions, and the Atlantic City skyline a few miles to the north.

On clear days, the view runs for miles. A plug of green glass set into the platform floor refracts light down into Lucy’s interior below.

The spot where you’re standing is the same one Lafferty used to sell land parcels to buyers more than 140 years ago.

The park behind her puts the beach just steps away

Lucy stands in Josephine Harron Park, named for a co-founder of the Save Lucy Committee. The park sits right on the beach, so after the tour you can walk straight onto the sand.

Margate City Beach runs wide and clean without the boardwalk congestion you get a few miles north in Atlantic City. The park is fenced and easy to manage with kids.

Picnic tables sit on site, and you can photograph Lucy from outside without paying admission. Water sports, including kayaking, paddleboarding and surfing, are available nearby.

A new visitor center breaks ground while the gift shop moves

The Save Lucy Committee broke ground in spring 2026 on a new Visitor Welcome and Interpretive Center next to Lucy.

When it opens, expected around 2027, it will replace a gift shop built in the 1980s when Lucy was drawing about 3,000 visitors a year.

The new center will include ADA-accessible restrooms, a larger retail space, interactive exhibits, and a virtual tour option for visitors who can’t manage the stairs.

The City of Margate pledged up to $1.5 million toward the $3.5 million project.

Lucy’s story is what American preservation looks like at its best

What Lucy represents goes beyond a six-story elephant on a beach.

She is one of the earliest examples of creative marketing in American history, a building designed entirely to sell something, that outlasted the land it was built to sell by more than a century.

The volunteers who saved her in 1970 with door-to-door fundraising and a seven-hour moving operation set a template that historic preservation groups have followed ever since.

After nearly 145 years, the community’s investment in keeping her here is not slowing down.

Visit Lucy the Elephant in Margate City, New Jersey

You’ll find Lucy at 9200 Atlantic Ave. in Margate City, at the corner of Atlantic and Decatur Avenues, about six miles south of Atlantic City. Tours run every 45 minutes.

The stairs inside are narrow, so wear comfortable shoes.

Hours run Wednesday through Friday from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. and Saturday and Sunday from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., with extended daily hours in summer.

The park and exterior photos are free. Tour tickets are sold at the temporary gift shop across the street at 9219 Atlantic Ave.

This article was created with AI assistance and human editing.

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