The Tacky History of the Pink Flamingo

From its start in Massachusetts, of all places, to its inspiration of a John Waters film, the lawn ornament has some staying power

  • By Abigail Tucker
  • Smithsonian magazine, September 2012, Subscribe
 
Plastic Flamingos
From The Smithsonian Collections: Plastic Flamingos, c. 1980 (Jason Pietra)

(Page 2 of 2)

That soon changed. Twenty-somethings of the Woodstock era romanticized nature and scorned plastics (à la The Graduate). Cast in flaming pink polyethylene, the flamingo became an emblem of what Nancy delicately calls the “T-word”—tackiness. Sears eventually dropped the tchotchkes from its catalog.

But then, phoenixlike, the flamingo rose from its ashes (or rather, from its pool of molten plastic: As demonstrated at the finale of Waters’ film, flamingos don’t burn, they melt). As early as the 1960s, pop artists including Andy Warhol and Claes Oldenburg had begun elevating the low brow and embracing mass culture. And then, of course, Waters’ movie came out.

By the mid-1980s, the flamingos were transitioning from a working-class accessory to an elaborate upper-class inside joke. They furnished colorful substitutes for croquet wickets and clever themes for charity galas. The bird became a sort of plastic punch line, and, at worst, a way of hinting at one’s own good taste by reveling in the bad taste of others.

Waters got tired of it and gradually gave away his flamingo collection. “It’s a classist thing,” he says. “People like them in a way that’s not that original anymore.”

In their yard near Leominster, Nancy and Don Featherstone typically tend a flock of 57 (a nod to the creation year) that neighborhood college students feel compelled to thin. “They steal ’em,” Featherstone says. “You’ve got to have a sense of humor.” As for Waters’ movie, the Featherstones haven’t seen it, and seem to regard it as a bit of a knockoff. (“My creation was out long before he started his stuff,” Featherstone says.)

Even Waters, who these days maintains that plastic lawn flamingos should be kept inside, “like pornography,” hasn’t hardened his heart entirely to the creatures. Visiting his hometown one Christmas, he noticed that Santa’s sleigh had landed in his formerly tasteful childhood yard, drawn by a dashing team of pink flamingos. “I almost cried when I saw that,” he admits. “I thought it was so sweet!”


Send Us Your Pink Flamingos!

John Waters’ childhood yard was an exercise in good taste. His mother, the president of a local garden club, cultivated burgeoning flowerbeds and precise hedges. In their buttoned-up Maryland suburb, lawn ornaments of any kind, let alone plastic pink flamingos, were anathema. One house down the street had a fake wishing well and that was painful enough.

“I don’t remember ever seeing a pink flamingo where I grew up,” the filmmaker muses. “I think I saw them in East Baltimore.”

In 1972, Waters released the film Pink Flamingos, which was called both an abomination and an instant classic. The movie has almost nothing to do with the tropical fowl that stand sentinel during the opening credits: The plot mostly concerns the exertions of a brazen and voluptuous drag queen intent on preserving her status as “the filthiest person alive.”

“The reason I called it ‘Pink Flamingos’ was because the movie was so outrageous that we wanted to have a very normal title that wasn’t exploitative,” Waters says. “To this day, I’m convinced that people think it’s a movie about Florida.” Waters enjoyed the plastic knickknack’s earnest air: Though his own stylish mom might have disapproved, the day-glo wading birds were, back then, a straightforward attempt at working-class neighborhood beautification. “The only people who had them had them for real, without irony,” Waters says. “My movie wrecked that.” Forty years later, the sculptures have become unlikely fixtures of a certain kind of high-end sensibility, a shorthand for tongue-in-cheek tackiness.

But, for his part, Waters says he has completely OD’d on the flamingos. For one thing, he learned during an ill-fated Floridian photo shoot that he doesn’t like real birds, and they don’t like him. (“You can’t just mosey into a pit of pink flamingos. I have tried.”) For another, the lawn sculptures have become “loaded objects,” classist tools of the well-to-do mocking the taste of the less fortunate. The real plastic flamingo is in a sense extinct, Waters says: “You can’t have anything that innocent anymore.”

First designed in 1957, the fake birds are natives not of Florida but of Leominster, Massachusetts, which bills itself as the Plastics Capital of the World. At a nearby art school, sculptor Don Featherstone was hired by the plastics company Union Products, where his second assignment was to sculpt a pink flamingo. No live models presented themselves, so he unearthed a National Geographic photo spread. It took about two weeks to model both halves of the bird, brought into the third dimension by then-revolutionary injection-mold technology.

A flamingo-friendly trend was the sameness of post-World War II construction. Units in new subdivisions sometimes looked virtually identical. “You had to mark your house somehow,” Featherstone says. “A woman could pick up a flamingo at the store and come home with a piece of tropical elegance under her arm to change her humdrum house.” Also, “people just thought it was pretty,” adds Featherstone’s wife, Nancy.

That soon changed. Twenty-somethings of the Woodstock era romanticized nature and scorned plastics (à la The Graduate). Cast in flaming pink polyethylene, the flamingo became an emblem of what Nancy delicately calls the “T-word”—tackiness. Sears eventually dropped the tchotchkes from its catalog.

But then, phoenixlike, the flamingo rose from its ashes (or rather, from its pool of molten plastic: As demonstrated at the finale of Waters’ film, flamingos don’t burn, they melt). As early as the 1960s, pop artists including Andy Warhol and Claes Oldenburg had begun elevating the low brow and embracing mass culture. And then, of course, Waters’ movie came out.

By the mid-1980s, the flamingos were transitioning from a working-class accessory to an elaborate upper-class inside joke. They furnished colorful substitutes for croquet wickets and clever themes for charity galas. The bird became a sort of plastic punch line, and, at worst, a way of hinting at one’s own good taste by reveling in the bad taste of others.

Waters got tired of it and gradually gave away his flamingo collection. “It’s a classist thing,” he says. “People like them in a way that’s not that original anymore.”

In their yard near Leominster, Nancy and Don Featherstone typically tend a flock of 57 (a nod to the creation year) that neighborhood college students feel compelled to thin. “They steal ’em,” Featherstone says. “You’ve got to have a sense of humor.” As for Waters’ movie, the Featherstones haven’t seen it, and seem to regard it as a bit of a knockoff. (“My creation was out long before he started his stuff,” Featherstone says.)

Even Waters, who these days maintains that plastic lawn flamingos should be kept inside, “like pornography,” hasn’t hardened his heart entirely to the creatures. Visiting his hometown one Christmas, he noticed that Santa’s sleigh had landed in his formerly tasteful childhood yard, drawn by a dashing team of pink flamingos. “I almost cried when I saw that,” he admits. “I thought it was so sweet!”


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I bought two pink plastic flamingos a few years ago because they're such retro fun. I named them Flo & Mingo. Unfortunately, they currently reside in the trunk of my car, as I live in a 2nd-floor apartment with no place to plant them. (I would've loved this article more without the many references to that nasty movie.)

Posted by Kathi L on February 3,2013 | 06:54 PM

A friend and I took her plastic pink flamingos on vacation in northern Lower Michigan and took photos of them in various locations. At the bottom of the Dune Climb at Sleeping Bear Dunes they were a big hit as they sunned themselves on a bright blue towel.

Posted by Margaret Peitz on November 2,2012 | 08:43 PM

A youth group fundraiser was to "flamingo" or "flock" someone's front yard by putting two dozen or more pink flamingoes in their yard after dark. People could purchase "flamingo insurance" for a fee to prevent being flocked. Once you were flocked, however, you had to pay to have them removed. Of course that payment entitled the person to select the next family to be flocked. Usually it just involved the people you knew so everyone talked about it and thought it was great fun. And, of course the teens thought it was fun to get together each night to move the flock. After the original purchase of the flamingoes, the money from removal fees or insurance was all profit for the cause.

Posted by Elaine on September 23,2012 | 09:59 PM

Remember, as you walk down that long kielbasa path of life, Parma spelled backwards is A-M-R-A-P. (Relevant to pink flamingos BTW).

Posted by dale thorn on September 19,2012 | 01:59 PM

Interesting!

Posted by Mike on September 19,2012 | 01:24 PM

My wife and I recently retired and moved to Florida from Ohio where our flock of plastic pink flamingos adorned our English Gardenesque back yard, much to the delight or chagrin of our friends and neighbors. When looking at real estate down here, we realized that a condo association would scorn our flock, so we decided to buy a home in a neighborhood free of such restrictions where they now are proudly displayed under our palm tree. I haven't seen Mr. Waters film, but will have to seek it out now.

Posted by Kevin Young on September 15,2012 | 10:26 AM

Yes! I agree with Jennifer...pink flamigos are the symbol of outrage and defiance to the banana republics that are HOAs. 60 million Americans are now subordinate to a system of governence that insults the US Constitution and everyone who ever fought to preserve and defend it. Plant your pink flamingo in all of its tacky glory!

Posted by MikeR on September 6,2012 | 08:29 AM

On Pescadero Creek Road in Loma Mar, a small town on the Northern California Coast south of San Francisco once lived the Pink Flamingo Man. His three acres on the creek sported over 500 flamingoes. When the next door neighbor protested at this tacky display he turned his many flamingoes towards her house in disapproval. She moved. Holidays saw the flamingoes in costumes or sleighs o jail dependent on the season. Motorcycle and bicycle groups planned rides just to gaze on whatever he was up to. When the owner moved he took a chunk from all our hearts. Key word Pescadero and Pink Flamingo for pictures and further anecdotes.

Posted by Flo Samuels on September 4,2012 | 08:19 PM

Delightful. Perhaps Smithsonian will publish similar pieces on the quirky histories of those physical things so unique to us, now archived in the "American Kitsch" wing of our national past.

Posted by Stan S. / NYC on August 29,2012 | 03:40 PM

Pink flamingos are now the mascot of people fed up wih the over-reaching authority of home-owners's associations. When I got a stupid letter from my HOA to mow my grass (after it had already been mowed, natch) I boutght myself a pair of of Featherstone flamingos and planted them front & center in my front yard as a big thumbing-my-nose at the HOA. The flmingos moved with me to NE OK a few years ago and spent a few months in the front yard there. I have a picture after a snow fall with snow on them that I love. (:

Posted by jennifer on August 29,2012 | 01:10 PM

These icons are the inspiration for our decades long family (and friends) flamingo club. I have a standard "tasteful" plastic flamingo in the side-door garden along with a more recent metal one with a slightly crazed, disheveled appearance..they both make me smile.

Posted by Sue on August 29,2012 | 12:03 PM

I have a one pink flamingo in the back yard. It stands there to greet us every day, whether it's hot or cold. It's bright pink outshines all the green of summer and all the drab of winter. What could be better!!

Posted by Harvey Hoffman on August 27,2012 | 05:29 PM

I was born in 1935, and was married in 1952. I don't recall when the first pink flamingos began to appear in people's yards, but I remember the first ones were cut from a piece of 1/2 to 1 inch wood. The neck was made from a thick strap of metal bent into an S shape.Heavy gauge wire was used for the legs like the plastic birds. They would sway when the wind was blowing. This may have been a home project from Popular Mechanics magazine or one of the other home project magazines. In your story you say they began in 1957 which may have been true of the molded plastic birds. As I was researching this after reading your story I found some wooden flamingos offered for sale. I guess I just wanted to know if you were aware of when the pink flamingo yard art really began. C.

Posted by c. abbot on August 26,2012 | 11:53 PM

I put pink flamingos in the yard to embarrass my teenagers. It was great! Their friends would come over and ask why we had flamingos in our yard.

Posted by ginny pass on August 26,2012 | 08:24 PM



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