The dark side of Lucy the Elephant: NJ smuggler’s secret past

Does America have no values left? I was, as social media likes to say, today years old when I realized New Jersey’s iconic good girl Lucy the Elephant was once a very bad girl.

Let me back up.

In case you’re the last person in the Garden State who doesn’t know this, Lucy the Elephant is the 6-story tall tourist attraction of a building in Margate whose outside looks like a giant elephant.

Built in the late 1800s, it was eventually used as everything from a cottage to a restaurant, business office, and even a tavern.

Dennis Malloy/Townsquare Media

When I worked in Atlantic City years ago, people from that radio station hounded me all the time about seeing Lucy the Elephant.

“How have you NOT gone yet!?”

I never have. Now that I no longer live in South Jersey I’m sure I never will. What I learned today though? I no longer feel guilty about that. For anyone who visited her was consorting with a criminal.

You see, that time Lucy was being used as a tavern, well it ended when prohibition came. Alcohol was illegal and speakeasies were the rage. And Lucy was up to her neck in it.

Turns out she was used to signal rum runner ships that were off the coast. Bootleggers would watch her eyes. Green lights were shone through Lucy the Elephant’s eyes when the coast was clear and they could bring their booze ashore. When her eyes glowed red it meant don’t come, the authorities were watching.

She was complicit!

Now my understanding is this was a small featured storyline in “Boardwalk Empire” but I never watched the show. It wasn’t just fiction though. It really did happen. I never heard the dark truth until today when a listener shared it on our Deminski & Moore show. So just in case I wasn’t the last to know this, there you have the dark criminal past of our beloved pachyderm icon.

Bad girl, Lucy, bad girl.