She’s 137, and Everyone Wants a Picture With Her

Here’s the thing about the elephant: Everybody has a story.

About visiting the friend of the grandmother who sold tickets from the office in the elephant’s left rear foot. About the first time they climbed the spiral staircase up her leg and gazed at the sea from her howdah. About catching sight of her backside while driving up Atlantic Avenue and knowing they were nearly home.

“We’d drive to my grandparents’ house every summer,” Jeffrey Gillman said. “My mom would always say, ‘When you see the big tushy, you know we’re close.'”

On the last Saturday before Labor Day, the Gillmans — Jeffrey; Jodi; Nathan, 3; and Blake, 6 months — arrived before the gates were even unlocked to pose for a final summertime photo in Margate, New Jersey, beside Lucy, the beloved Victorian-era elephant that stands six stories high in this small city along the shore.

“We had to say goodbye and tell her to have a good winter,” said Jeffrey Gillman, a lawyer from Philadelphia.

For the Gillmans, along with hundreds of other families, a visit and photo op with Lucy marks the end of summer vacation. Visiting hours will soon shrink, from weekdays to weekends only. Cold weather will soon arrive; winter is not the season for an elephant by the sea.

As Hurricane Florence moved toward the coast this past week, Lucy the Elephant’s executive director, Richard Helfant, watched its path and readied towels, just in case, to stuff inside the hatch on her roof to keep out the rain. There wasn’t much more he could do.

“She’s stood for 137 years,” he said. “Lucy will protect herself.”

After Hurricane Sandy, the park at Lucy’s feet was flooded, but the elephant emerged unscathed. Once the roads to the city reopened, people from as far as Maryland arrived to help Helfant clean up.

What makes a person — or thousands of them, from Arizona and California and New York and across New Jersey — fall in love with a giant wooden elephant? Enough to return year after year? Enough to send $10, $20 and, occasionally, $2,000 to help keep her doors open?

There were once three colossal elephants on the East Coast; Lucy is the last one standing, a national historic landmark now visited by 130,000 people every year.

Her story began before the city of Margate itself, a whimsy built in 1881 by a Philadelphia engineer and real estate speculator hoping to lure investors to empty marshland south of Atlantic City.

Throughout the years, the elephant would serve as a tourist attraction, a tavern and, briefly, home to an Englishman who built a tiny bathroom in the crook of her shoulder. Celebrated, neglected and eventually condemned, Lucy was saved in the 1970s by devoted citizens who believed the elephant was as much a part of the city as the shore itself.

She’s older than a dozen states. She has been visited by President Woodrow Wilson and Mister Rogers and Bob Vila. She has been struck by lightning (twice) and survived hurricanes and floods. For fans, she’s nothing less than a touchstone.

“We’ve had weddings and bar mitzvahs and birthdays at Lucy,” Helfant said. “The only thing we haven’t had is an actual birth. We’re waiting for that.” When a recent tour of Lucy began, at 10 a.m., Emily Olin and Ryan Dillingham were ready. They arrived from Boston the night before. It was Dillingham’s first visit, but Olin had met Lucy once as a young girl. The memory stuck with her.

“I was 4 or 5 years old, and I loved it,” Olin said. “I always wanted to come back.”

And so, to celebrate her 30th birthday, they did.

“We had a nice birthday dinner, we had some cocktails, but we came here to see Lucy,” Dillingham said. “It was about this. She wanted to see Lucy for her birthday.”

The skies were thick and gray, better weather for an elephant than the beach. Crowds grew throughout the day, clustering at her feet. People perched on her yellow toenails, snapping selfies. They admired the red cape painted across her back and her 17-foot-long ears. Attempts were made to jump high enough to touch her tusks. (Not likely: After they were stolen twice in the 1980s, both were redesigned to tilt up and out of reach.)

Tours run every 30 minutes and take place in a tall-ceilinged room that stretches from Lucy’s belly to the top of her head. Here, kids stand tiptoe to peer through her eyes and out to sea. The miniature bathtub installed in 1902 remains, along with cases holding old tails and pieces of tin that served as Lucy’s turn-of-the-century skin.

A short film kicks off with a jaunty jingle: “Down in Margate-by-the-sea, we can make a memory at Lucy the elephant, Lucy the elephant.” Lucy aficionados like Alaina Pattillo, a 31-year-old from Northfield, sang along. Her dad grew up in Margate and once helped wash Lucy’s trunk, she said.

It was the first visit for her 6-month-old daughter, Arden, but Pattillo knew Lucy well.

“I gave a speech on Lucy in college,” Pattillo said, smiling. “I might have included the song.”

While Lucy’s beginnings were quirky — the trolley from Atlantic City ferried people to clambakes at her feet — the heart of her story came later in the form of a 20th-century rescue.

In 1969, a local man named Ed Carpenter learned that the land where Lucy stood was being sold. At the time, she was already condemned — wood rotting, gaping holes giving way to pigeons — but the idea of the city without her was inconceivable to him.

Carpenter paid $1 for Lucy’s deed, and with his wife, Sylvia, and a neighbor, Josephine Harron, founded the Save Lucy Committee. They hatched a plan to restore Lucy, beginning with an ambitious change of scenery.

On July 20, 1970, the 90-ton elephant was hoisted onto a truck. Seven hours later, miraculously intact, she arrived at her new home two blocks up the beach. The quest to restore her continued for decades — this is what resonates with many Lucy fans, including Anthony Montemarano, a first-time visitor from Ramsey, New Jersey.

“I liked that the best, that all these people in Margate got together and saved her,” he said. At sunset, the sky was streaked pink and gray, and Todd Sidkoff, a 42-year-old from Leeds Point, arrived with his family just in time for the last tour. Until that moment, his experience with Lucy stopped at the sidewalk below, where he used to eat hot dogs from the old stand next door.

“I’ve known Lucy all my life,” he said. “It amazes me this is my first time inside.”