October 17, 2026
Lucy the Elephant: Walk Inside a Six-Story Elephant in Margate
Before there were six-story ballpark hot dogs and giant fiberglass dinosaurs, there was Lucy. Built in 1881 as a real-estate gimmick, Lucy is a six-story elephant-shaped building in Margate that has been a tavern, a hotel, and a summer home, and is now the oldest surviving roadside attraction in America. You can walk inside her. It is exactly as strange as it sounds, and that is the point.
There is no other way to describe the experience of being inside a giant wooden elephant except to say that you will smile the entire time and not really know why.
Getting There
About 2 hours. Take the Garden State Parkway south toward Atlantic City and get off for Margate — Lucy stands at 9200 Atlantic Avenue, Margate City. Guided tours run every 45 minutes, and hours shrink in the off-season, so check lucytheelephant.org before you commit to the drive.
What to Explore
You climb a spiral staircase inside one of Lucy's legs, wind up through the body to a small museum of her very weird history, and come out on a viewing platform on her back with the Atlantic on one side and Margate on the other. The whole thing takes under an hour and is impossible to do without grinning, which is more than you can say for most museums. Then walk the beach in the kind of light you only get at the shore in the fall — low, gold, and empty.
It is a longish haul from Bergen County for a single attraction, so make a shore day of it: Lucy, the beach, maybe a drive down to Cape May for the Victorian houses. Two hours down, a few stops, and the quietest version of the Jersey Shore you will ever see — the one the locals do not tell you about on purpose.
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Written by Frankie
Frankie is Chief Editor & Marketing Director for Frosty Flame Vehicle Rentals.
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