Pink Flamingo

When the pink flamingo splashed into the fifties

market, it staked two major claims to boldness. First,

it was a flamingo. Since the 1930s, vacationing

Americans had been flocking to Florida and returning

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5 home with flamingo souvenirs. In the 1910s and

1920s, Miami Beach’s first grand hotel, the Flamingo,

had made the bird synonymous with wealth and

pizzazz. . . . [Later], developers built hundreds of

more modest hotels to cater to an eager middle class

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10 served by new train lines—and in South Beach,

especially, architects employed the playful Art Deco

style, replete with bright pinks and flamingo motifs.

This was a little ironic, since Americans had

hunted flamingos to extinction in Florida in the late

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15 1800s, for plumes and meat. But no matter. In the

1950s, the new interstates would draw working-class

tourists down, too. Back in New Jersey, the Union

Products flamingo inscribed one’s lawn emphatically

with Florida’s cachet of leisure and extravagance. The

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20 bird acquired an extra fillip of boldness, too, from the

direction of Las Vegas—the flamboyant oasis of

instant riches that the gangster Benjamin “Bugsy”

Siegel had conjured from the desert in 1946 with his

Flamingo Hotel. Anyone who has seen Las Vegas

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25 knows that a flamingo stands out in a desert even

more strikingly than on a lawn. In the 1950s,

namesake Flamingo motels, restaurants, and lounges

cropped up across the country like a line of semiotic

sprouts.

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30 And the flamingo was pink—a second and

commensurate claim to boldness. The plastics

industries of the fifties favored flashy colors, which

Tom Wolfe called “the new electrochemical pastels of

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the Florida littoral: tangerine, broiling magenta, livid

35 pink, incarnadine, fuchsia demure, Congo ruby,

methyl green.” The hues were forward-looking rather

than old-fashioned, just right for a generation, raised

in the Depression, that was ready to celebrate its new

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affluence. And as Karal Ann Marling has written, the

40 “sassy pinks” were “the hottest color of the decade.”

Washing machines, cars, and kitchen counters

proliferated in passion pink, sunset pink, and

Bermuda pink. In 1956, right after he signed his first

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recording contract, Elvis Presley bought a pink

45 Cadillac.

Why, after all, call the birds “pink flamingos”—as

if they could be blue or green? The plastic flamingo is

a hotter pink than a real flamingo, and even a real

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flamingo is brighter than anything else around it.

50 There are five species, all of which feed in flocks on

algae and invertebrates in saline and alkaline lakes in

mostly warm habitats around the world. The people

who have lived near these places have always singled

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out the flamingo as special. Early Christians

55 associated it with the red phoenix. In ancient Egypt, it

symbolized the sun god Ra. In Mexico and the

Caribbean, it remains a major motif in art, dance, and

literature. No wonder that the subtropical species

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stood out so loudly when Americans in temperate

60 New England reproduced it, brightened it, and sent it

wading across an inland sea of grass.

The American Scholar, Spring 1999