Lucy the Elephant

Story

James V. Lafferty built Lucy not as a joke but as a sales pitch. In 1882, he secured U.S. Patent #268503 — the exclusive right to construct an "animal-shaped building" — and immediately put it to work, hauling prospective real estate buyers up into Lucy's howdah to survey the Atlantic coastline and imagine owning a piece of it. The whole thing cost between $25,000 and $38,000, required nearly a million pieces of wood, 200 kegs of nails, 4 tons of bolts and iron bars, and 12,000 square feet of tin to skin the exterior. Philadelphia architects William Free and J. Mason Kirby modeled the silhouette on Jumbo, Barnum and Bailey's celebrated elephant. She stands 65 feet tall and weighs roughly 90 tons.

Lafferty's patent ran seventeen years, and the building itself has outlasted almost everything around it. By the 1960s Lucy had served as a real estate office, restaurant, cottage, and tavern — the tavern shuttered by Prohibition — and was scheduled for demolition. A group of Margate residents, eventually organized as the Save Lucy Committee under Josephine Harron and Sylvia Carpenter, fought the deadline and raised enough money to move her instead. On July 20, 1970, Lucy traveled roughly 100 yards to a city-owned lot in a journey that took seven hours. She's been there ever since.

The shape of Lucy's head is anatomically Asian. But only male Asian elephants carry tusks, and Anton Gertzen's daughter-in-law Sophia named her Lucy in 1902, so she has spent more than a century as a six-story female elephant wearing tusks she shouldn't technically have. After lightning struck in 2006 and blackened their tips, even that small anomaly became part of the record. A 2021 restoration replaced more than half her tin skin — the old surface had degraded beyond repair — and she reopened in December 2022, as improbable and specific as the day Lafferty drove the first nail.