Lucy The Elephant, the giant wood and tin elephant in Margate N.J., needs tens of thousands of dollars for renovations.

MARGATE, N.J. — She’s been hit by lightning — twice — had a giant tent pole slammed into her posterior, and been subjected to pokes and prods from the feet of climbing children.

But what’s currently afflicting Lucy The Elephant is a tiny plague — grains of windblown sand that are eating away at her wooden railings and scouring the paint from her wood and tin hide. The 134-year-old tourist attraction near the beach in Margate, just outside Atlantic City, needs to have some crumbling wood replaced, along with a new coat of paint from head to multicolored toenails.

And the $58,000 cost of the work to the National Historic Landmark isn’t peanuts.

So the small group that runs and maintains Lucy is trying to raise tens of thousands of dollars by selling T-shirts and appealing to crowdfunding websites to give the old girl a trunk lift.

“We’re going to have to raise $30,000 to $40,000 ourselves for this,” said Richard Helfant, the group’s executive director.

Standing 65 feet tall and looking out over the beach, Lucy has delighted generations of children and their families, who pay to climb the narrow, winding wooden staircase inside one of her hind legs, eventually leading up and out onto her howdah, or passenger carriage.

That area is Lucy’s most pressing need. Work began last week to replace rotting wood along the edges of Lucy’s howdah. While the main railings remain safe, lower barriers designed to prevent children from falling through were crumbling and needed to be replaced. And the entire six-story structure will be repainted.

The 90-ton elephant was built in 1881 by a land speculator trying to lure people to what was then known as South Atlantic City. Since then, it has functioned as a restaurant, a tavern, someone’s house, and recently, a tourist attraction.