Episode 215: An Eighth Wonder

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This is the memory palace. I'm Nate DeMayo.

The man who built it called it the eighth wonder of the world, which, though it was not, was not an unheard of thing to call your grand new structure.

The Panama Canal, the Sydney Opera House, the Empire State Building, the Oswan Dam and the Hoover Dam and the Three Gorges Dam, probably some other dams I'm forgetting, Erie Canal, the George Washington Bridge, the dome under which Major League Baseball's Houston Astros played during the 1965 season on dirt that had been spray-painted green after the grass died.

All of those structures were tagged with the title at some point, for some period of time when people would look up or out at it and feel wonder, before it became just another thing in the world.

The wonder built by James V. Lafferty in 1885 wasn't a thing for very long, though I will get to the end later, a bit before the end of the story.

But first, to the building's beginning, when Lafferty was trying to figure out how to turn a profit on a bunch of land he bought out among a string of sandy islands cut off from the New Jersey coast and its then-booming population center of Atlantic City by a pesky tidal creek.

The moon would do its thing and suddenly it would be too wide to cross and it was hard to entice people to come out and even look at the land. So Lafferty came up with a way to help them look.

And I cannot tell you where the idea came from. What in his background might suggest that it, of all possible ideas, took hold of him with such clarity of mind and necessary fervor to make it happen.

Such that as he was talking to his friends or his wife laying out the problem, I've got all this great land but people won't come out to see it. And those friends or his wife are offering suggestions.

Hey, maybe you put an ad in the paper.

Maybe offer up some incentive like the 1885 equivalent of a free toaster oven or four nights stay at a resort and spa in Orlando with free passes to the Disney Park of your choosing.

Maybe put up a billboard. And to those ideas, James Lafferty responded, No.

I've got this.

I cannot tell you how he came to build the elephant.

Or how he found an architect who helped him draw up his plans or the construction crew that helped him erect a six-story tall elephant.

a hollow one covered in tin, painted a blue-gray with staircases running up and down the legs, and a howda, which is one of those carriages that one sometimes sees in old pictures from India of the highborn perched under a canopy, riding on the back of an Asian elephant, or how it was that he first enticed people in through the doors and the feet and up the stairs and the legs to that covered carriage there on the back of his elephant building, where they would find an observation deck.

from which they could take in panoramic views and check out Lafferty's real estate holdings.

When he patented patented the designs for this building, he was clearly thinking beyond its potential utility as an elevated platform from which potential homeowners could view tracts of land.

Though what uses to which the general public might put such a structure are unclear.

His patent application did hint at the possibility that this design concept could be repurposed to embody creatures other than elephants if so desired, be they mammal, fish, or fowl.

If he expected this patent would turn into an annuity as other builders built other other elephants up and down the eastern seaboard or made a moose in the main woods, a brown bear above the Golden Gate, a snake along the Snake River, armadillos, alligators, beavers,

it did not come to pass.

For years there was just the one elephant, and it was not the eighth wonder of the world.

To build that one, Lafferty took his own design, with its original dimensions, and multiplied.

And so rose a second pachyderm, twice the size of the first, 150 feet above Coney Island.

There's an article in the New York Times from May of 1885 about a tour of what was officially called the Elephantine Colossus. Its property manager, a Mr.
C. A.

Brandenberg, wind and dined a group of reporters and other VIPs and led them through an ornate door in the enormous rear left foot, then up the stairs and its leg and through each of its seven stories, into a 60-foot-wide room with a triangular roof 35 feet above the floor, called the stomach room, as yet undecorated, on through the diaphragm to the liver room and to the left lung room that would, the reporters were told, be home to a museum during peak tour season.

Then on to the cheek room. where they were encouraged to look at the ocean through the large circular windows of the elephant's eyes.

And finally to the observation deck, to take in a view which at that height was grander than even the loveliest beachside listings in all of New Jersey.

The glittering waters of the Atlantic, the mouth of the Hudson, Manhattan and Staten Islands, the Brooklyn Bridge, still a wonder then.

Coney Island down below, a seedy, gaudy spectacle just beginning to come into its own.

The press and VIPs got to see it for free. It would soon cost a dime.

A small price to pay for the keen-eyed patron to see all the the way to Yellowstone Park in Rio de Janeiro, in London, in Paris, the manager said, while lying.

Come that summer, the Elephantine Colossus was open for business.

A hotel offering rooms by the body part.

The views were particularly good in the shoulder rooms, but It might be more fun to tell the folks back home that you'd stayed in the trunk. One leg held a cigar store.

The restaurant was appropriately in that vaulted room in the stomach.

It was spectacular at night, with beams of light shooting out the elephant's eyes.

The strains of music coming up from the bars and bandstands of Coney Island. The calliopes of the carousels,

all scoring the laughter of the crowds in the observation deck, enjoying their dimes worth,

marveling at the world as it stretched out beneath them,

maybe thinking a light on a sailboat on the horizon was Buckingham Palace.

Season after season, Coney Island grew all around it.

After a few years, there was a roller coaster, one of the first in the world, 50 feet off the ground, an ingenious wooden structure with dips and turns, going twice around the elephant.

And there was fun to be had inside, all manner of amusements. Dioramas of the European countryside, of Mammoth Cave in Kentucky, an arcade, drop a coin in a slot and test your luck or your strength.

And there were other illicit amusements to be had, especially off-season when the crowds were mostly local, mostly out for a good time or up to no good, depending on how you look at it.

You could rent a room, be it hip or tail, by the hour or two.

There was a time when New Yorkers would say they went to see the elephant. as a euphemism for a prostitution.

The saying outlasted the hotel itself, it seems. The place burned to the ground in September of 1896.

No one knows what started it. There's an illustration from a magazine that came out shortly after the blaze.
It is a vision of hell, flames, and smoke pouring out of the thing's eyes.

A massive conflagration.

One that could be seen all the way out in New Jersey. Didn't even need to climb up a fake elephant's leg to get a look.
The Elephantine Colossus was never rebuilt.

Luna Park went up in its place.

But one more thing in the time that I have left about the Elephantine Colossus. In the brief time it sparked wonder there at the edge of the water.

Before it became just another thing and before it burned down.

There was a moment,

brief though it was, when it was the tallest thing down there.

Before the Statue of Liberty went up to welcome immigrants as they made their way to Ellis Island. And during that time, those immigrants, on ships in the night,

the first thing they would see of America wasn't the glowing torch of Lady Liberty,

but lights coming out of the eyes of an elephant-shaped hotel.

Which sounds about right.

This episode of The Memory Palace was produced by me, Nate DeMayo. This show gets research assistance from Eliza McGraw.

It is a proud, proud member of Radiotopia, a network of independently owned and operated podcasts from PRX, a not-for-profit public media company.

If you want to follow me on Twitter or Facebook, that would be at TheMemory Palace.

On Instagram and threads, it is at thememory palace podcast, which will also be the address at Substack of a newsletter I will be launching soon. Just watch the space.

If you want to drop me a line in the meantime, you can always do so at nate at thememorypalace.org.

And I wanted to take a second to shout out something going on here with the Radiotopia family.

It is a series that I've been totally immersed in lately from my friend Benjamin Walker and his show Benjamin Walker's Theory of Everything.

It is a profoundly entertaining and just plain profound intellectual history of the way the CIA weaponized art and culture to capture hearts and minds around the world in the 1950s.

It's really a stunning piece of work. And you can check it and all the other Radiotopia shows out at radiotopia.fm.
I'll talk to you again.

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