Pink Flamingo Lawn Ornaments, Suburban Ranch House, 1950s

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Pink Flamingo Lawn Ornaments, Suburban Ranch House, 1950s — Archive & Atlas

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Pink Flamingo Lawn Ornaments, Suburban Ranch House, 1950s — Archive & Atlas

Unattributed 1950–1959

AA-2026-5483A6

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Two plastic pink flamingos stand in the front lawn of a California-style ranch house, doing exactly what Don Featherstone's 1957 creation was designed to do: signal that the owners had taste, or at least had been to a store. The yellow board-and-batten siding, the diamond-pane picture window with its decorative shutters, the precisely edged flower beds with their yellow roses — this is a front yard assembled with genuine conviction, and the flamingos are the punctuation mark that tells you which decade wrote the sentence.

The plastic flamingo was the most successful piece of lawn sculpture in American history largely because it was cheap, cheerful, and faintly tropical at a moment when postwar suburbia was hungry for all three. Homeowners who bought them were not being ironic — irony about lawn ornaments was still a generation away. They were participating in the new American ritual of the maintained front yard as personal statement, and the flamingo said: we live somewhere pleasant, and we know it.

The flower beds are immaculate, the grass is clipped, and the bird of paradise plant behind the flamingos suggests a warm-weather climate, most likely Southern California. The whole scene is a small argument that domestic life in the 1950s had been perfected, made by people with no reason to doubt it.

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