From California to Charm City, families welcomed the bright, beloved bird into their yards.īy the 1960s and ’70s, however, the flamingo’s mainstream popularity waned. With a burgeoning consumer society came the embrace of plastic and mass production, and hence, Featherstone’s tour de force. Same, but front lawns were a way to keep up with the Joneses and also standĪpart. All across the country, houses looked the II America was in a state of suburban sprawl, with baby-boom desire driving development of nuclear dream homes. One of his first assignments was to create the neon, umbrella-shaped bird, which debuted in 1957, and was soon immortalized in American culture. He attended art school there, honing his craft as a sculptor, before ultimately landing a job at a large manufacturer of lawn and garden decorations. Fittingly surnamed, Featherstone was not a Baltimore native but rather from Massachusetts. On Monday, the plastic bird’s inventor, Don Featherstone, passed away at the age of 79, nearly 60 years after his famed flamingo first came off the assembly line. “That may have been the beginning of my obsession with them, because whatever I was told I wasn’t supposed to like, I always did.” “When I grew up, I think my mother, who was great at the tyranny of good taste, mentioned her disdain for lawn ornaments, especially pink flamingos,” Waters says. Over the years, the mid-century lawn ornament has cemented itself in our city’s narrative, largely thanks to our own auteur John Waters and his 1972 film Pink Flamingos. And, of course, we have the pink flamingo. Years later they paid homage to that where the town council named the pink flamingo the official bird of Madison.Baltimore is a city of iconic symbols. In 1979 in Madison, Wisconsin over 1,000 pink flamingos were laced on the lawn in front of the Dean’s office. Get flockedĮventually pink flamingos became part of the larger community and became part of prank culture where people would put them on others’ lawns as a joke. Pink and flamingos were big in the early 1980s and, thus, pink flamingos were once again a popular lawn ornament.
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Gay bars and drag shows embraced the icon such that it appeared on earrings, on shoes and in fashion of all sorts as sort of a campy symbol.īy the mid 1980s the pink flamingo finally outsold the duck at Union Products, partially due to the popularity of the TV show Miami Vice.
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Pink Flamingos is actually about drag queens and some say it may be one of the most offensive pictures ever.īut it celebrated the drag queen and became campy and symbolic as well as becoming huge in the gay community. While the 1972 was not about the flamingos themselves, it did feature a trailer park and with two of the birds adorning a mobile home. But in the 1970s they came back because of John Waters who directed the film Pink Flamingos.
In the 1960s there was a backlash against them as the hippies and counter culture rejected the pink flamingo. Other lawn icons of the era included tiki statues and lighthouses. For $2.75 you could place two of these in your yard and really stand out and a lot of people did just that. With pink being a very popular color in 1957 the flamingo took off and helped offset the blandness of the growing number of tract homes of the time. At the time the company had two-dimensional ducks and flamingos and Featherstone’s first product was a three-dimensional version of the duck followed by a three-dimensional pink flamingo. The iconic plastic pink flamingo was originally created by Don Featherstone at Union Products in Massachusetts in 1957.
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