Lucy the Elephant is a six-story, elephant-shaped building on the beach in Margate City, New Jersey, that you can actually walk through, climb inside, and stand on top of. Built in 1881 as a real estate stunt, she’s now a National Historic Landmark and, by most accounts, the oldest surviving roadside attraction in the country. If you’ve ever driven the Jersey Shore and wondered why there’s a giant tin elephant staring at you from the dunes, this is her story.
What exactly is Lucy the Elephant?
Lucy is a six-story elephant-shaped wood frame and tin clad building, constructed in 1882 by James V. Lafferty in Margate City, New Jersey. According to the organization that runs her today, Lucy is 6 stories tall, weighs 90 tons, and is covered with 12,000 square feet of sheet tin. She stands right along the beach, and depending on which source you check, she’s either 60 or 65 feet tall — either way, she towers over everything around her, including the nearby houses.
She wasn’t built for whimsy alone. Lucy was built with the purpose of promoting real estate sales and attracting tourists to the area, and today she remains the oldest surviving roadside tourist attraction in America. That’s a genuinely wild fact when you consider she’s been standing since before cars existed on Jersey roads.
Architecturally, she’s a one-of-a-kind. She’s considered the only remaining example of 19th-century zoomorphic architecture in the United States.
Why did anyone build a giant elephant in the first place?
The man behind Lucy was a real estate speculator, not an artist. Built in 1881 by James Vincent de Paul Lafferty Jr, Lucy the Elephant was intended to attract buyers to the building lots Lafferty was offering for sale in the area, and it’s reported to have cost $25,000 to construct. His pitch was simple: get people curious enough to visit a bizarre elephant-shaped building, then sell them a beach lot while they’re standing inside it.
Lafferty didn’t stop at one elephant, either. He was confident enough in the concept that on December 5, 1882, the U.S. Patent Office granted James V. Lafferty Patent #268503, giving him the exclusive right to make, use or sell an “animal-shaped building” for a duration of seventeen years. He funded the design and construction of Lucy at South Atlantic City, now called Margate, and employed Philadelphia architects William Free and J. Mason Kirby for the design.
He then built two more elephants under that patent. Lucy is the sole survivor of three elephant buildings Lafferty constructed — the “Elephantine Colossus” on Coney Island (1885) was destroyed by fire in 1896, and “Light of Asia” in Cape May was demolished in 1900. Lucy is the last one standing, literally and figuratively.
As for the name itself, it came later. The structure was sold to Anton Gertzen of Philadelphia in 1887 and remained in his family until 1970, and Anton’s daughter-in-law, Sophia Gertzen, reportedly dubbed the structure “Lucy the Elephant” in 1902.
What has Lucy been used for over the years?
This is where it gets fun. An elephant-shaped building with a hollow interior is basically a blank canvas, and Margate residents used every inch of it. Through the first half of the 20th century, Lucy served as a restaurant, business office, cottage, and tavern (the last closed by Prohibition), and the building was depicted on many souvenir postcards, often referred to as “The Elephant Hotel of Atlantic City,” though the actual hotel was in a nearby building, not inside the elephant.
At one point, a family genuinely lived inside her. In 1902 an English doctor and his family leased the Elephant as a summer home, moving into Lucy’s ample interior and converting the main hall into four bedrooms, a dining room, kitchen and parlor, with a bathroom outfitted in one of the small front shoulder closets using a miniature bathtub. Imagine explaining to houseguests that the bathroom is in the elephant’s shoulder.
She’s also tougher than she looks. In 1944 a hurricane devastated the Jersey coast — Lucy took a beating but somehow survived, while other nearby properties including the entire Margate Boardwalk were destroyed. Decades later, Hurricane Sandy made landfall near Margate in October 2012, and Lucy remained unscathed, although the surge reached her toes and a small booth in the parking lot was blown over. A lightning strike in 2006 blackened the tips of her tusks, but that’s about the worst weather has managed to do to her in over a century.
How did Lucy almost get demolished?
By the late 1960s, Lucy wasn’t a novelty anymore — she was just an old, decaying building sitting on land someone wanted to develop. Lucy continued in use as a spectacle and tourist attraction well into the twentieth century, but the harsh marine environment and deferred maintenance eventually took a toll, and by 1969 the structure was nearly derelict and the owners of the property had sold the land to developers. The elephant was slated for demolition.
A group of locals wasn’t having it. In 1969, Edwin T. Carpenter and a group of Margate citizens formed the Margate Civic Association, which later became the Save Lucy Committee under Josephine Harron and Sylvia Carpenter. They were given a 30-day deadline to move the edifice or pay for its demolition, and various fund-raising events, the most successful a door-to-door canvass by volunteers, raised the money. On July 20, 1970 — the date now celebrated as her birthday — she was hauled to safety, and in a volunteer effort of heroic proportions, the Save Lucy Committee raised the funds to move the elephant to a City owned property a few blocks away and restore it, and by 1974 the exterior and “super structure” had been restored and Lucy was once again opened to the public for the first time in 12 years. Two years later, in 1976, Lucy was designated a National Historic Landmark during the United States Bicentennial celebration.
Can you actually go inside Lucy the Elephant?
Yes, and this is the part that makes her worth an actual trip rather than a drive-by photo. There’s no charge to park, walk the grounds, or browse the gift shop, but if you want to go inside the elephant, you need a ticket for one of the guided tours. As of the latest posted pricing, admission runs $9.00 for adults, $8.50 for teens ages 13–18, and $5.00 for children ages 3–12, with no charge for kids under 3 (though they still need a ticket).
Once inside, the interior of Lucy the Elephant is only accessible via spiral stairs located in her hind legs, though the grounds surrounding her are accessible using deck board walkways. The tour climbs up through her body and ends at the howdah — the carriage-like structure on her back — which gives you a sweeping view of the beach and the rest of Margate. Tours typically run about every 45 minutes during open hours, so you don’t need to plan your whole day around one specific slot.
One quirky bit of trivia worth knowing before you go: Lucy is a National Historic Landmark, but that doesn’t mean she’s part of the National Park system. While Lucy the Elephant is part of the National Historic Landmark Program administered by the National Park Service, the structure is not located in a National Park. She’s owned and operated locally, by a nonprofit, not the federal government.
Is Lucy the Elephant still a big deal today?
Very much so. She keeps racking up recognition well into her second century. In May 2025, Lucy was voted the No. 1 Best Roadside Attraction in the country as part of USA Today’s 2025 readers’ choice awards. She’s also mid-renovation: in January 2023, the City of Margate approved a plan to build a new visitor center at Lucy’s site — a two-story building with a gift shop, information displays, meeting rooms, and restrooms, built where the current gift shop is and raised higher to meet modern flood safety rules.
Not every funding effort has gone smoothly. On August 12, 2024, a $500,000 federal grant was announced to help restore Lucy’s inside spaces, but this grant was later canceled on April 11, 2025. The nonprofit that runs her, the Save Lucy Committee, still leans heavily on ticket sales, gift shop purchases, and donations to keep her standing — which is a pretty fitting way for a building built to sell real estate to keep paying her own bills.
Planning a visit
Lucy sits at 9200 Atlantic Avenue in Margate City, about five minutes south of Atlantic City, right on the beach in a small park. If you’re doing a Jersey Shore day trip, she pairs easily with a walk on the Margate or Ventnor beaches, and she’s an easy add-on if you’re already headed toward Atlantic City’s casinos or boardwalk. Bring cash or a card for the gift shop, wear shoes you don’t mind climbing stairs in, and give yourself at least 30–45 minutes for the tour and the view from the top. There’s genuinely nothing else quite like her on the entire East Coast — a century-old elephant you can walk through and come out the other side of, exactly as intended.
NOTE TO THE ADVENTURER: This guide is meant to spark curiosity for what lies beyond the horizon — not to serve as a guarantee. Roads fall into disrepair, buildings are torn down and rebuilt, and properties change hands; 'tis your responsibility to do your own research before setting out. Always heed local and regional law, and always respect ground that isn't your own. Take every entry here as a suggestion, not a decree. This guide's contents were gathered with the aid of artificial intelligence, and like any scout, it will from time to time lead you astray. You assume all risk in following its counsel, and neither this blog nor its author is liable for any loss, injury, or misfortune that results.
