Standing six stories tall on the southern New Jersey shore, Lucy the Elephant is one of the most unusual structures in the United States. Built in 1881 in what is now Margate City — about 5 miles south of Atlantic City — this massive elephant-shaped building has outlasted the era that created it by more than a century. Today, it holds the title of the oldest surviving roadside tourist attraction in America.
The man behind Lucy was James V. Lafferty, an American inventor with an eye for spectacle. His goal was straightforward: build something so remarkable that people would stop, stare, and eventually buy land nearby. Lucy was designed as a real estate marketing tool. Lafferty originally called the structure Elephant Bazaar, and he used its towering howdah — the carriage mounted on the elephant’s back — to show potential land buyers the surrounding area from above.
Lafferty secured a patent in 1881 giving him the exclusive right to manufacture, use, or sell animal-shaped buildings for seventeen years. He wasted no time putting it to use. He commissioned Philadelphia architects William Free and J. Mason Kirby to handle the design work, and construction began at South Atlantic City — the area now known as Margate.
The numbers behind Lucy’s construction are staggering. The structure measures 65 feet (19.7 meters) high, 60 feet (18.3 meters) long, and 18 feet (5.5 meters) wide. It weighs roughly 90 tons and ranks 12th among the tallest statues in the United States. Builders used nearly one million individual pieces of wood, 200 kegs of nails, 4 tons of bolts, and 12,000 square feet of tin sheeting to bring the elephant to life.
Twenty-two windows are cut into the structure throughout, letting light into its interior spaces. The building’s frame is wood, and its outer skin is tin — a combination that has required significant preservation work over the decades. Despite its unusual form, the structure functions as a real building with usable interior rooms.
The howdah at the top remains one of the most talked-about features. During tours, visitors climb up inside the elephant and emerge into the howdah, where they get sweeping views of Margate, Atlantic City’s skyline, the beach, and the Atlantic Ocean stretching out to the horizon. It’s the same vantage point Lafferty used to sell real estate to 19th-century buyers.
In 1887, Anton Gertzen of Philadelphia purchased the structure. It stayed in the Gertzen family for more than eight decades, until 1970. During that long stretch of family ownership, the elephant took on the name most people know today. In 1902, Sophia Gertzen — Anton’s daughter-in-law — named the structure “Lucy the Elephant,” and the name stuck.
Lucy’s design draws from a specific real-world reference. Her head is modeled after an Asian elephant, and the tusks on the structure reflect the anatomy of a male elephant. When the building was first constructed, it was referred to as male. Over time, the name Lucy took hold, and the structure came to be identified as female — a shift that was never formally explained but has remained ever since.
Through its early decades, Lucy served several different purposes. Beyond its original role as a real estate attraction, it functioned at various points as a tavern and a summer cottage. Visitors would rent out the interior spaces during the warmer months, making Lucy one of the more unconventional lodgings on the Jersey Shore.
Lafferty’s patent covered more than just this single structure. He envisioned a whole line of animal-shaped buildings, and Lucy was his first. Two other elephant structures were built under his patent — one in Cape May, New Jersey, and a much larger one called the Elephantine Colossus in Coney Island, New York. Neither of those survived. Lucy is the only one still standing.
By the mid-20th century, Lucy had fallen into serious disrepair. The Gertzen family sold the property in 1970, and the structure faced the real possibility of demolition. A local community group stepped in, raised funds, and managed to have Lucy moved about half a mile to her current location on Atlantic Avenue in Margate. The move preserved her from a scheduled teardown.
The National Park Service recognized Lucy’s historical significance and designated her a National Historic Landmark in 1976. She is one of very few commercial roadside attractions in the country to earn that status. The designation helped secure ongoing preservation funding and attention.
Today, Lucy is maintained by the Save Lucy Committee, a nonprofit that manages tours and preservation efforts. Visitors can walk through her interior, climb to the howdah, and get the same panoramic views that surprised real estate buyers more than 140 years ago. The tours run seasonally, drawing thousands of visitors each year to Margate City.
Few buildings in American history were born from such a specific and calculated idea — and even fewer have lasted this long while still serving the public. Lucy the Elephant began as a sales gimmick on the New Jersey shore and became a six-story wooden landmark that has outlasted everything around it.
