The Big Duck enjoys top billing as a quirky roadside attraction

FLANDERS, NY — On the daybreak of the Nice Despair, Lengthy Island duck farmer Martin Maurer and his spouse. Jeule, had been on a highway journey and loved a cup of Joe inside a giant espresso pot.

They determined, the story goes, that if the world can have a giant espresso pot, then it actually wants a giant duck, and that they’d be those to offer us all with it.

And so in 1931 was born one of many quirkiest and most influential roadside points of interest in American historical past. The Massive Duck measures 20 ft tall, 18 ft large, and 30 ft lengthy. It is held collectively by a wooden body, wire mesh, white stucco cement – and 91 years of affection, courtesy of numerous caretakers and guests. The duck’s pink eyes come from the tail lights of a Ford Mannequin T.

This was the Nice Despair, and it paid to be sensible.

To say that the Massive Duck stays a preferred vacationer vacation spot is to not do it justice. A go to to the Massive Duck is not only a cease on a trip itinerary or a facet journey throughout a weekend keep within the Hamptons. Making your technique to the Massive Duck on Lengthy Island’s East Finish takes some doing. It is a pilgrimage, one thing folks do as a result of they hear about it and resolve to witness it for themselves.

The Massive Duck was made for bucket lists.

That is what a pair and their daughter instructed ABC’s Localish just lately as they took within the splendor of the Massive Duck, on Route 24 in Flanders, New York. They’d seen it in a e book years in the past, and now, they had been lastly seeing it in particular person.

The Massive Duck is a holdover of a time when the East Finish had dozens of duck farms.

There’s just one left right this moment, and it isn’t the Massive Duck. The one geese you will discover being bought from inside its stomach as of late are of the memento selection, however the primary draw on the Massive Duck has lengthy been the joyful structure.

Guests to the Massive Duck will possible meet Janice Jay Younger, however she’s not simply ringing up your T-shirt and mug on the money register. Younger has an encyclopedic data in regards to the Massive Duck and is one in all its proudest promoters. As guests are available, they usually trickle in all day, from far and large, she’s prepared with a compressed however compelling historical past of the Massive Duck.

She talks in regards to the Maurer household, who had the pluck to construct the duck. She’ll discuss how this peripatetic Pekin, which first settled in close by Riverhead, moved just a few instances through the years, till lastly nesting, presumably for good, again in its longtime dwelling of Flanders, on the Massive Duck Ranch. She’ll discuss in regards to the marketing campaign within the Nineteen Eighties to put it aside, after the duck farm closed.

She’ll level to a collage on the wall with dozens of images, postcards and articles about different examples of programmatic structure – these massive espresso pots, massive tea kettles, massive fish, massive ketchup bottles that sprang up throughout America many years in the past, when highway journeys dominated and aircraft flights had been for the flowery – or had been nonetheless simply flights of fancy.

Richard Martin, director of Historic Companies on the Suffolk County Parks Division, explains the time period “duck” caught as a method of describing this type of structure – buildings designed to seem like the product they bought, hoping to lure motorists off the highway to spend a couple of dollars and perhaps snap an image or two.

Because the proprietor of the duck, Suffolk County is charged with caring for it, with assist from Associates of the Massive Duck. The land the duck sits on belongs to the City of Southampton, and is protected against improvement. Individuals will have the ability to go to the duck and the encircling ranch in perpetuity.

Younger stated the duck means a lot extra to locals right here in Flanders. On this hamlet, The Massive Duck is the middle of their neighborhood.

“Flanders is form of a no man’s land. You understand, we are the western a part of Southampton City. And typically we simply really feel just a little forgotten right here. So there is no financial institution, there is no publish workplace, there is no Zip Code. You understand, we really don’t have any grocery retailer,” Younger explains.

Flanders does have one thing no person else has, she factors out.

“We do have a Massive Duck.”