Recently sold – a 12″ x 9.5″ print of Lucy the Elephant Building Patent Blueprint to a buyer from Cumberland, VA.
Giant hotels shaped like elephants go back to the famous Coney Island “Elephant Colossus,” a 200-foot tall elephant structure with 31 rooms that once stood proudly and prominently on Surf Avenue. It was lost in a fire in 1896, so none of us would have had a chance to stay in it.
But now you can stay at a smaller version on the New Jersey shore. Lucy is about half the height of its Coney Island counterpart, with six stories, but hails from around the same time period. In fact, was designed by the same man, a James V. Lafferty from Philadelphia who held the patent. Lucy, who was built in 1891, was originally also nearly suffered the same fate as its Coney Island relative after being struck by lightning on several occasions.
A room in Lucy can be rented via AirBnB – https://www.airbnb.com/rooms/42455047
Lucy the Elephant is a six-story elephant-shaped example of novelty architecture, constructed of wood and tin sheeting in 1881 by James V. Lafferty in Margate City, New Jersey, approximately five miles south of Atlantic City.
Lucy the Elephant, a national landmark built-in 1881 in Margate, a seaside city about five miles south of Atlantic City, is the last of three hulking pachyderms that once stood along the East Coast.
“The oldest surviving example of zoomorphic architecture on Earth,” boasted her human handler and lifelong cheerleader, Richard Helfant.
Each year, about 132,000 paying visitors climb a narrow spiral staircase into the belly of the beast. Some continue up the side stairs to Lucy’s ornate howdah, which is perched atop the 65-foot-tall elephant and offers stunning views of the Atlantic Ocean and the Atlantic City skyline.
