Lucy the Elephant’s animal magnetism looms large

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Lucy the Elephant stands 65 feet above Margate, N.J., just south of Atlantic City. | Dave Hoekstra~Sun-Times

IF YOU GO

LUCY THE ELEPHANT: 9200 Atlantic Ave., Margate, N.J., (609) 823-6473, lucytheelephant.org. Open Monday-Saturday,
10 a.m.-8 p.m.; Sunday, 10 a.m.-
5 p.m. through Labor Day. Hours are truncated a bit in the fall and winter. Adults, $7; children 2-11, $4; kids under 2, free.

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Updated: October 29, 2011 12:36AM

MARGATE, N.J. — It has been a slow summer when the season highlight has been your time spent inside of the world’s largest elephant.

Or has it?

Lucy the Elephant sits along the Atlantic Ocean just south of Atlantic City, N.J. She is America’s oldest roadside attraction. She was born in 1881 and has been a restaurant, cottage and saloon (closed by Prohibition).

Lucy is 65 feet tall and stands in a feeding position, trunk down. Your inner child will get a kick out of seeing the window in her butt.

She still has wide eyes.

Lucy’s glory days represent a more pedestrian time where people could be amazed by humble charms. Lucy’s visitors never forget this. I won’t.

Lucy was built with more than a million pieces of cedar. Access to her innards is gained through a spiral stairway of 27 steps in the left hind leg. You exit through another spiral stairway on the right hind leg. On a clear day, Lucy can be seen from eight miles away.

“James Lafferty built the elephant in 1881 to sell real estate,” said Bob McGuigan, assistant director of the Save Lucy Committee during a conversation in Lucy’s stomach. “He owned land here but couldn’t sell it. He figured if he built something strange, people would come look at it and he could sell them land. Unfortunately, it didn’t work.”

I wondered why Lafferty built an elephant as opposed to a giraffe. Or a monkey.

“We don’t have any history on that,” McGuigan said. “He did patent the idea of building any animal-shaped building. There was an Indian revival going on at the time, so elephants were a popular animal. And elephants are a stout, sturdy animal. A giraffe wouldn’t lend itself well for building.”

Lafferty was a Philadelphia-based engineer and inventor who also built a 12-story-tall elephant at Coney Island and another elephant in Cape May, N.J. In 1895, he sold the Margate Lucy to the Gertzen family, who opened the Elephant Hotel next to Lucy — where you never forget your room key.

The Margate Lucy was originally on Cedar Grove Avenue. She moved to her current location in 1970 after her native grounds were sold to condo developers. Lucy was donated to the non-profit Save Lucy Committee, which has raised more than $1.5 million to preserve the cultural icon.

It was no small tusk for the committee to move the 90-ton structure. Lucy was put on a truck and accompanied by a police escort. It took eight hours to move her two blocks.

After a $124,000 renovation, Lucy reopened in 1974. Two years later, she was designated a National Historic Landmark.

The inside of Lucy features a display of her original wooden red tongue, which fell out during the 1970 move. There are pictures of visitors, including Mr. Rogers, who broadcast an episode of his children’s show from the elephant in 1981. President Woodrow Wilson visited Lucy in 1916. So did Henry Ford.

From Lucy’s right eye you can see the beach and ocean. When you climb up to her ornate howdah (riding carriage), you can see Atlantic City to the north.

Some Lucy lore deals with Prohibition-era rum runners. When Lucy’s eyes were red, that meant to stay away from the shore. If her eyes were green, the coast was clear.

“A lot of people say Lucy looks like she was built like a ship,” McGuigan said. “That makes sense because Lafferty made money in the ship-building industry and likely called on those connections to help him build the elephant.”

Maybe even more amazing than Lucy’s size is the fact that she was originally a male.

In Africa, male and female elephants have tusks. In Asia, only males have tusks. Lucy has big white tusks accented by a red circle.

“It’s a funny story,” McGuigan said, his voice echoing around her stomach. “Lucy was fashioned after Jumbo the Elephant, which was P.T. Barnum’s famous elephant of the era. Jumbo was male.

“At some point during the Gertzen ownership, they decided to name it Lucy,” he said, adding that some stories say Lucy was the name of Mrs. Gertzen’s favorite aunt. “Other people say it was her least favorite aunt, who may have been a little larger than normal.”

McGuigan has been attending to Lucy for 10 years. He started working at the historical site at age 16 and still has the enthusiasm of a teenager.

“Kids love this place,” he said. “You’d also be surprised how many people saw the elephant 50 years ago come by and want to see if it’s still here.”

Then they become young again.