The Big Duck

The story

In 1931, a Long Island duck farmer named Martin Maurer needed a way to snag the attention of motorists passing through Flanders on Route 24. Rather than settling for a wooden roadside sign to advertise his Pekin ducks and eggs, he hired builders to craft a 20-foot-tall, 30-foot-long bird out of wire mesh and ferrocement. To give the creature a distinct glint after dark, he wired red Ford Model-T taillights directly into its eye sockets.

Maurer's concrete fowl worked absurdly well—so well that it permanently invaded architectural theory. Decades later, architects Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown used the building to coin the term "duck" to describe any structure explicitly shaped like the product or service sold inside it. That distinction turned this roadside lure into patient zero for novelty architecture and earned it a spot on the National Register of Historic Places.

Now maintained by Suffolk County Parks, the structure no longer trades in real poultry. Instead, the side hatch opens into a tiny, hollow concrete torso packed with historical photos, duck artifacts, and novelty souvenirs.