One of the things I love about Walt Disney World is how much detail goes into everything
from the rides to the hotels, and how that detail themselves can be packed with history.
Today I want to talk about the elephant in the room when it comes to Disney’s Boardwalk Resort.
And I mean the literal elephant in the room.
When you enter the lobby and head over to the left, there's a small scale
model of an elephant building.
What is it, and why is it there?
It was the beginning of the 1880’s and James Vincent DePaul Lafferty Jr had a problem.
Besides an unnecessarily long name, he also had a number of plots of land in an area south
of Atlantic City that, at the time, was known as…
South Atlantic City.
Today it’s Margate, New Jersey.
Lafferty was looking to sell that land and since Atlantic City wasn’t what it is today,
he was facing issues in winning over the eyes of potential buyers.
So he had an idea.
Why not build something big and strange and novel?
It would attract people who would want to see the novelty, increasing the value of the
area, and it would potentially attract land buyers who would want to capitalize on that value rising.
Lafferty would end up settling on an elephant.
He would partner with architects William Free and Joseph Kirby in designing a six story
tall elephant shaped building called the Elephant Bazaar.
Back then the design credit for buildings like this wasn’t tracked as closely.
Kirby often gets the credit as architect, but other sources assert Free’s involvement too.
Who did what and how much isn’t exactly clear.
What is clear, however, is that it was no cheap project.
It started with a $25,000 budget, which today would be around $650,000.
Like many projects it would go over budget, with a final tab of $38,000 or just shy of
a million dollars today.
The Elephant Bazaar would open in 1881 and was considered a success.
It drew in crowds who wanted to see the building, and even helped with selling some of that land.
It was alleged that Lafferty would take potential buyers to the top of the elephant, in the
howdah or that big tent on his back, to look at the plots of land that were for sale from afar.
Lafferty figured he was on to something, so he patented the idea of these giant
animal shaped buildings and decided that he wanted to build a second one.
It would be bigger and better, and in New York City.
The Elephantine Colossus in New York’s Coney Island was over twice as high as the Elephant
Bazaar, standing at 122 feet high and 150 feet long.
It took over 250 men to build to the structure and at a cost that was advertised as over
a quarter of a million dollars, which today would be over seven million dollars.
Now I don’t know if that was the actual cost.
That same advertising claimed you could see Niagara Falls from the top, which was 300
miles away, so clearly they weren’t afraid to flat out lie to sell the spectacle.
Guests would enter the elephant through the back leg and went up a set of stairs after
which they could tour the 31 different areas of the elephant.
They could also take a look outside through the two eyes, which were not just windows
to the elephant’s soul, but literal windows as well.
Unfortunately for Lafferty, while the second elephant was bigger and better, the Colossus
was not a financial success.
Both the Elephant Bazaar and the Elephantine Colossus would go through various transformations
over the years.
They’d still be elephants, but their interior purpose would change.
The Colossus, for instance was at one point a hotel before being converted into brothel,
and then again into a boarding house.
The Bazaar went through even more changes.
Suffering from financial woes, Lafferty would eventually sell both his patent for the buildings
as well as the Bazaar.
In 1887 the Gertzen family would buy the building and in 1902 it would be converted into a summer home.
It was then, as the story goes, that the building was renamed Lucy, and the name stuck.
To this day the building is known as Lucy the Elephant.
Eventually Lucy would be re-purposed into a tavern in 1904, and then again into a general
tourist amusement.
The family that bought Lucy eventually retired the attraction in 1970 and donated the building
to the city, who hoisted it up on wheels and moved it over two blocks to a city park, where
it remains today as a national historic landmark.
Unfortunately the Elephantine Colossus did not have a similar happy ending.
The building, a financial flop, would slowly fall into a state of disrepair over the course
of 11 years.
Then on September 27th, 1896, like many wood-based amusement parks in that era, it would burn
to the ground in a fire.
Today at Disney’s Boardwalk Resort the lobby is home to a scale model of Lucy the Elephant.
Lucy was only 15 minutes away from Atlantic City, and the Elephantine Colossus found a
home in Coney Island.
So while they were only two buildings and didn’t kick off the craze that James Lafferty
was hoping for, they were still inherently tied to the world of boardwalks in the early
20th century.
And that’s what I love about this place.
Sure they cover all of the major staples of the theme they choose.
The lights, the storefronts, the boardwalk itself.
But they also find these little corners of history that are worth representing.
In this case, the elephant in the room.