Flamingo Flock at Tropical Garden Lagoon, 1950s

Archive & AtlasEstablished · MMXXIII

Flamingo Flock at Tropical Garden Lagoon, 1950s — Archive & Atlas

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Flamingo Flock at Tropical Garden Lagoon, 1950s — Archive & Atlas

Unattributed 1950–1959

AA-2026-726E06

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Sometime in the postwar decade, a resort or zoological garden decided that the best way to signal tropical luxury was to release several dozen flamingos onto a manicured lawn and let guests watch them mill around a shallow lagoon. This was a sound theory. The flamingo had become, by the 1950s, the unofficial mascot of the American idea of the exotic — the same bird that was simultaneously being cast in pink plastic for suburban front yards, which says something about the era's relationship with nature.

The flock divides itself between the grass and the water with no particular agenda, which is what flamingos do when no one has given them anything urgent to accomplish. The careful stonework retaining wall and the clipped upper lawn beyond it suggest a well-funded operation — a Caribbean resort or a Florida attraction of the kind that flourished when Americans discovered that flying south for a week was now something ordinary people could afford to want.

Whoever pressed the shutter had stepped back far enough to get the whole spectacle, which was the correct instinct. Up close you get a bird. From here you get the argument the whole garden was making: that this many improbable creatures, doing nothing in particular on a perfect lawn, constituted civilization at its peak.

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