5 Kitschy Roadside Attractions Worth Seeing

Here are Cappuccino's top picks, so gas up the car and head out. An adventure awaits you!

It’s no secret that we here at Cappuccino are addicted to kitsch, which surely illustrates a psychological defect of some sort.

What is kitsch, you ask? That’s a harder question to answer than you might think.

The Oxford Dictionary defines kitsch as “art, objects, or design considered to be in poor taste because of excessive garishness or sentimentality, but sometimes appreciated in an ironic or knowing way.” A bullet-proof argument could be made that Cappuccino has questionable taste and a heightened sense of the ironic, but I think it’s more than that.

With kitsch, the subject matter must be instantly and effortlessly identifiable (e.g., Warhol’s tomato soup cans, a lava lamp, pink flamingos, Jesus candles). Kitsch must focus on themes and subjects with a positive emotional valence. It often inhibits aggression and promotes a feeling of safety, intimacy, even care-taking. My obsession with the Bob’s Big Boy, for instance. This is top-level kitsch. And it’s not wholly unrelated to my obsession with pugs, Frenchies, and fat orange kitties, all of whom evoke the same sensation of cozy familiarity based on an ugly/cute emotional aesthetic.

Fortunately, kitsch is an itch that can be given a good scratch at any number of bizarre roadside attractions in the United States. If you, like me, enjoy seeing weird, marginally creepy stuff that makes no sense and gives you a feeling akin to vague horror that (oddly) isn’t unpleasant, let me present you with the following:

1. Lucy the Elephant.

   

   Located in Margate City, New Jersey, Lucy holds the distinction of being the oldest surviving roadside tourist attraction in America. She’s six stories tall, constructed of wood and tin, and was the brainchild of James V. Lafferty, a sort of Pied Piper of novelty architecture in 1881. He applied for and was granted a seventeen-year patent on the construction of animal-shaped buildings.
   
   For over a hundred years, Lucy has proudly stood her ground. In 2006, she was struck by lightning, which blackened the tips of her tusks. In 2012, Hurricane Sandy’s tidal surge wetted her toes. She’s been repurposed as an Airbnb ($138 per night, although after her refurbishment, that price will probably go up) and since her noble exterior has weathered, a 1.4 million dollar campaign got underway a few years ago to replace her metal skin. Lucy reopens on Memorial Day of 2022.
   

2. The PEZ Visitors Center.

   “Four thousand feet of everything Pez” sounds like a winner to me. Deep in the heart of Orange, Connecticut, is a building dedicated to America’s (actually, Austria’s) most famous candy dispenser.
   
   In the event that you didn’t grow up with this novelty item, Pez were small, pressed bricks of an unidentifiable sugary substance that you unpacked from a foil wrapper and nested inside a cigarette-lighter-shaped object that had a character head (e.g., Snoopy, Kermit, Spiderman, Shrek), which then tipped back to dispensed the candies into your open mouth.
   
   My Pez candies often didn’t make it out of the wrapper. Sometimes I would eat all twelve pieces before I could shove them into my favorite Tasmanian Devil Pez (the insertion of Pez candies was always a precarious and frustrating process for tiny hands). Now, some of those dispensers are worth thousands, which is pretty remarkable since they’re nothing more than cheap, spring-loaded plastic.

3. The Cross Island Chapel in Oneida, New York.

   

   This roadside attraction is so kitschy and bite-sized, I don’t know where to start. It’s an actual chapel, a white clapboard structure on a floating jetty where religious ceremonies, such as weddings, can be performed. You have to row out to get to it, which is psychologically pleasing (fewer teeming masses; more algae smell). Constructed in 1989, it has just under 30 square feet of space inside. It’s non-denominational and bills itself as the “Smallest Church in the World,” although that title is contested (Guinness World Records says the honor goes to the Living Water Wayside Chapel in Niagara Falls.) In any event, I would totally row out to see that thing, wouldn’t you?

4. Dinosaur Land.

   

   Maybe you, like me, were one of those derpy kids who prided themselves on knowing the name of every dinosaur. I was obsessed. My bookshelves sagged from the weight of my dinosaur books, a new one each year, as more types were discovered. If I’d known there was an actual dinosaur park somewhere, I would have hitchhiked to get to it, the goofier and kitschier, the better.

   
   Where else are you going to see a 70-foot-long Apatosaurus, a 40-foot-long Giganotosaurus eating a prehistoric bird, or the cow-like, plant-eating, bony-plated Stegosaurus? For the low, low price of $6.00 for kids and $8.00 for adults, you can cavort on a Jurassic playground, pretending to be ripped to shreds by a giant flying Quetzalcoatlus—although to be fair, she belonged to the late Cretaceous, not the Jurassic. Does life get any better than this?

5. Jake the Alligator Man at Marsh’s Free Museum.

   

   If a mummified half-man, half-alligator isn’t enough to lure you out of your car, I can’t help you. At Marsha’s Free Museum near Astoria, Oregon (surpassing even the ghoulish appeal of a taxidermized two-headed calf, shrunken head, and a human tapeworm) is curiosity-turned-cult figure Jake the Alligator Man. His origins are a mystery, but they can’t be far removed from the sideshow circuits of the 40s and 50s. His withered visage, leathery arms, and thousand-yard stare have been immortalized on T-shirts and bumper stickers alike (“I Brake for Jake,” “Friends of Jake”.) His glass case at Marsha’s Free Museum, a roadside stop that’s been open since 1921, is never without throngs of admirers. I plan on being one as soon as I make it to Oregon.

   Do you have a taste for kitsch—or kitschy tendencies? If so, I want to hear all about them. Please leave your comments below.