When I was a young boy Long Island’s world renowned ducks dominated the American duck industry. Over the past few decades, soaring prices for prime waterfront property, higher operating costs, urban sprawl and competition from growers in the Mid West and the South have combined to reduce duck production.
The Big Duck remains as a symbol of Long Island’s duck farming past.
As recorded by the National Register of Historic Places:
The Big Duck is a wood frame, wire mesh, concrete surfaced building designed in the shape of a Peking duck to house a retail poultry store. The building was constructed in 1930-31 on busy West Main Street in the town of Riverhead on Long Island, NY. It measures approximately 15 feet wide across the front, 30 feet long from breast to tail, and 20 feet to the top of the head. The eyes are Ford Model “T” tail lights. The interior is approximately 11 by 15 feet.
In 1937, owner Martin Maurer moved the Big Duck four miles southeast to Flanders, where it occupied a prominent roadside location near the duck barns and marshes of Maurer’s new ranch. The Riverhead area, including Flanders, was the center of Long Island’s well-known duck industry. By 1939 there were approximately 90 duck farms in the county.
Maurer’s unusual tactic for enticing customers to purchase his ducklings was apparently a success. The Big Duck’s prime location, on one of the main roads leading east from New York City to the Hamptons, earned it a lot of attention. Many criticized the Big Duck, especially in the 1960s and early 70s, but architect Robert Venturi claimed that it clearly combined functional and symbolic aspects of architecture, and therefore was noteworthy. In fact, Venturi coined the term “duck” to describe a building in which the architecture is subordinate to the overall symbolic form.
The Big Duck closed in 1984, and in 1988 was relocated to the Sears-Bellows Pond County Park between Flanders and Hampton Bays on eastern Long Island.
This architectural folly (a building constructed strictly as a decoration, having none of the usual purposes of housing or sheltering associated with a conventional structure) was moved back to the original Flanders location on October 6, 2007. It is now open to the public as a gift shop.
The Big Duck on the move.
Artist Elaine Faith Thompson has painted the Big Duck in a style reminiscent of Vincent Van Gogh’s famous Starry Night.
The Big Duck V.G. by Elaine Faith Thompson. 16” x 20” Original Oil Painting
Related links:
The Big Duck from Road Side America
Big Duck from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
It’s a Tall Tail, but True from Newsday.com
~MadSilence
4 Comments
November 12, 2008 at 10:33 am
The Big Duck in traffic as if surrounded by car-ducklings and the Starry Night Duck are hilarious.
November 12, 2008 at 10:03 pm
QS, that Newsday picture is the best. I love the image of the Big Duck on the move, causing rubbernecking & a traffic jam.
And the Van Gogh setting is just perfect. That Van Gogh-esque sky adds a sense of fantasy to what is already an architectural folly.
~MadSilence
November 13, 2008 at 8:30 am
This is one of the things that excited me about coming to America and roadside attractions like this. I would love to have a duck building or something like it lol! it is marvelous.
November 13, 2008 at 8:55 am
Being a former Long Islander those pics make me remember why growing up Long Island was so special…Zman sends