Qualla: Margate City, New Jersey

Margate City, New Jersey: Introduction

Mon, 01 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Bruce Emmerling, CC BY-SA 4.0. She stands six stories tall on a patch of beachfront land at the corner of Atlantic and Decatur, gazing out over the same Atlantic Ocean she has watched since Chester Arthur was president. Her name is Lucy, she weighs roughly ninety tons, and she is an elephant - or rather, the world's oldest surviving roadside attraction in the shape of one, fashioned in 1882 from nearly a million pieces of wood and sheathed in tin. Tourists climb a spiral staircase up through her left leg into the howdah on her back. Lucy is the kind of thing that should have been demolished a dozen times over. Instead, Margate City - the surprisingly old, surprisingly literary town that surrounds her - kept saving her. That is most of what you need to know about the place.

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Image: Bruce Emmerling | CC BY-SA 4.0

Margate City, New Jersey: A Town Renamed Three Times

Mon, 01 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Farragutful, CC BY-SA 4.0. When the New Jersey Legislature carved Margate out of Egg Harbor Township on September 7, 1885, it called the new borough South Atlantic City - a name that promised much and delivered nothing distinctive. The town reincorporated as a city in 1897, then renamed itself one more tim...

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Image: Farragutful | CC BY-SA 4.0

Margate City, New Jersey: Lucy and the Tin Skin

Mon, 01 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit JohnTPaff, CC BY-SA 4.0. James V. Lafferty was a Philadelphia real estate developer with a problem common to nineteenth-century shore promoters: nobody could find his land. So in 1882, on the advice that a stunt-architecture would draw crowds, he commissioned a 65-foot wooden elephant to anchor his tract...

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Image: JohnTPaff | CC BY-SA 4.0

Margate City, New Jersey: Marven Gardens, Sort Of

Mon, 01 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit JohnTPaff, CC BY-SA 4.0. Open a Monopoly board and look at the cluster of yellow properties just before Go. Marvin Gardens, the spelling reads. It is a misspelling - and the property the game's designers intended is in Margate, not Atlantic City proper. Marven Gardens is a real residential enclave stradd...

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Image: JohnTPaff | CC BY-SA 4.0

Margate City, New Jersey: Storms and Strange Choices

Mon, 01 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Tallguy0187, CC BY 3.0. Margate built a boardwalk in 1906, closer to the high tide line than its sister boardwalks in Ventnor and Atlantic City. The placement made it more vulnerable, and the Atlantic eventually took the rest. The Great Atlantic Hurricane of September 1944 destroyed major sections. The ...

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Image: Tallguy0187 | CC BY 3.0

Margate City, New Jersey: The Improbable Roster

Mon, 01 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit David Saddler, CC BY 2.0. For a town this size, Margate has produced an unusual range of figures. Red Klotz, born 1920, founded the Washington Generals - the basketball team that has lost to the Harlem Globetrotters more than 16,000 times by Klotz's own count, and whose business model is to keep losing. P...

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Image: David Saddler | CC BY 2.0