Inside Lucy the Elephant, the 143-year-old Shore monument to kitsch

As someone who doesn’t visit the Jersey Shore often, what I look for when I do go isn’t sun or sand, it’s kitsch. I want the most gimmicky and sentimental experiences available, whether it’s the sensory overload of the Wildwood Boardwalk or the nostalgia of Silverball Retro Arcade in Asbury Park.

Lucy the Elephant, the Margate pachyderm whose legend looms as large as her ears, has long been on my kitsch list, but I had yet to visit her. The why at this point is irrelephant, the time had finally come, and so last month I set out to make Lucy’s acquaintance.

Billed as the nation’s oldest roadside attraction and “the only elephant in the world you can walk through and come out alive,” Lucy is six stories high, 60 feet long, and 143 years old, making her older than the Statue of Liberty and the Benjamin Franklin Bridge.

I already knew Lucy was a cutie patootie from photos, but two things struck me when I saw her in person. First, her fanny faces the main road, Atlantic Avenue, and there’s a large window directly in the center of her derriere. I later learned staffers refer to this window as Lucy’s “pane in the butt” and, aside from making me snicker like an 8-year-old, it did serve another purpose.

According to Richard Helfant, Lucy’s executive director and CEO, whom I interviewed after my visit, the rear window was for lighting.

“When she was built there was no electricity,” he said.

The other thing that struck me when I saw Lucy was the adorable pink tongue sticking out of her mouth that I’d never noticed in photos. It’s a small but playful detail that illustrates this elephant has sass. I like sass.

You can only see the inside of Lucy on a guided tour, the days and times of which vary depending on the season. I arrived early and bought my $9 ticket at the temporary gift shop across the road (the main gift shop is undergoing a total renovation).

The streets of Margate were empty that Wednesday in April, and I was the only person on my 11:45 a.m. tour. I didn’t introduce myself as a journalist to my guide, Liz Larkin, because I wanted the real experience, and Larkin didn’t question why a grown woman was touring a giant elephant alone on a weekday. I liked her from the start.

As we chatted by Lucy’s foot, Larkin was thrown a curveball when what sounded like an air raid siren went off, making it nearly impossible to talk.

“I don’t know if they’re testing or if we’re supposed to go underground,” she said. “Well, Lucy’s the safest place in the world so we’ll go into that.”

To her credit, Larkin radioed base (a.k.a. the gift shop) and waited until we heard an announcement that this was “a test of the Margate emergency alert system” before continuing the tour.

But as I later learned, she may not have been joking when she called Lucy the safest place in the world.

We entered the elephant through a small door in her left hind leg. Inside, we passed a tiny, defunct ticket window at the bottom before climbing a narrow, winding staircase into Lucy’s cavernous interior, which Larkin explained was built like the bottom of a ship, flipped upside down.

There were two doors on either side of Lucy’s innards and a raised platform directly ahead. Above us, a skylight gave the space a cool, blue glow.

The curved ceiling and walls — a.k.a. the inside of Lucy’s tummy — are a dull peach color, spotted with noticeable water stains, making it look like Lucy ate something that did not agree with her.

Those stains were to be addressed with a $500,000 federal grant awarded to Lucy last year for interior renovations, but that grant was slashed by Republican-led Congress just a week after my visit. Helfant said the Save Lucy Committee, the nonprofit that owns Lucy, has already raised $300,000 for the repairs and will now have to figure out how to raise $500,000 more.

Listen, I’m not going to argue that Lucy is as important as school funding or Social Security, but after meeting her and hearing her story I do think she’s a national treasure that deserves attention. A weird, elephant-shaped national treasure, sure, but we’re a young country and we have to protect what archaeological marvels we can for future civilizations. I’m sure the people of Rhodes wished they would have done more to shore up the Colossus.

On my tour with Larkin I learned Lucy was built by James Lafferty Jr., an eccentric Philadelphian (my favorite kind!), who took out a U.S. patent on all animal-shaped buildings.

“He thought animal-shaped buildings were going to be a huge deal,” Larkin said. “He was wrong.”

Lafferty owned a number of lots in what was then South Atlantic City and he built Lucy — who was originally named Elephant Bazaar — as a real estate office in 1881 to attract the attention of prospective property buyers.

Three years later, Lafferty built a second pachyderm structure nearly twice as tall on Coney Island called Elephantine Colossus, which served as an amusement attraction until it burned down in 1896. A third elephant edifice, the Light of Asia, was constructed in Cape May by another real estate developer, but was torn down in 1900.

Only Lucy survives.

She was given her name by the matriarch of her second owners, the Gertzen family, who purchased Lucy in 1887 and charged visitors 10 cents to go inside.

In her lifetime, Lucy has played many parts. She’s been a home, a real estate office, a beer garden, a roadside attraction, an Airbnb (for one weekend), a wedding venue, and a speakeasy.

This elephant has also weathered many storms — at least seven major ones, including Hurricane Sandy — and survived two direct lightning strikes.

“Anybody who tells you lightning doesn’t strike twice, let them talk to Lucy because it does,” said Helfant, who was inside Lucy when one of the bolts hit.

Lucy even survived imminent destruction after she was condemned in 1962, abandoned, and left to deteriorate for seven years until the Save Lucy Committee was formed. Following fundraising efforts, in 1970 the committee moved her two blocks to where she stands today, restored her, and opened her for tours again in 1974.

This is why Larkin said Lucy is the safest place in the world. Like life, Lucy finds a way.

Our final stop on the tour was Lucy’s howdah, or the riding carriage on her back. The wind was chilly six stories high, but well worth the view. I could see for miles out into the ocean and all around Margate. In the distance, I even spotted a water tower with Lucy’s portrait.

There were small details of the tour that were particularly charming, like a door that led to a tiny bathroom dating back to 1902 and a small nook on a staircase where giant, plastic peanuts are hidden. I especially loved looking out of the porthole windows in Lucy’s eyes, and seeing the ocean from her point of view.

I was lucky to get a one-on-one tour. On rainy days in the summer, Helfant says tours run at capacity — 48 people max — the entire day. (Tip: On sunny summer days, Lucy is busy in the morning and evening, but less crowded in the afternoon).

More than 150,000 people visited Lucy last year and 37,000 took a tour, which I pointed out to Helfant was more than three times the amount of people who toured City Hall.

“Lucy is cuter than Philadelphia City Hall,” he said.

I couldn’t argue with that. There’s just something about Lucy that captures people’s hearts. She’s been the subject of songs and documentaries and has been featured in movies like National Lampoon’s Vacation and TV shows like Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood.

For those who know Lucy best, like Helfant, she’s so much more than a roadside attraction.

“There is 100% a life to Lucy. She is not just a building, there is something more powerful than that,” he said. “It’s amazing we have little kids come for the first time and ask questions like: ‘What do you feed her?’ They think she’s real — and we do too."

As for Larkin, she told me when I talked to her in the days after our tour that she was drawn to Lucy because of what she exemplifies about humanity.

“I love anything that historically we can preserve, especially if it’s unique,” she said. “I think that’s what makes the human spirit stand out the most, when we have imagination like that.”