Goodbye To The Pink Lawn Flamingo

"ON Nov. 1, just two months shy of its 50th birthday, the plastic pink flamingo went extinct. Or more accurately, it stopped reproducing, when its manufacturer, Union Products, shut down the factory in Leominster, Mass.

That's sad news, but hardly surprising. The flamingo's glory days were behind it. Union Products cited the rising cost of plastic resins and of electricity, along with financing woes. Yet while the bird reigned as an icon in the late 20th century, it was bound to succumb to the very different tastes -- or the absence thereof -- in the 21st.

In 1957, the flamingo that would become lawn-art king was invented by a young Union Products designer with the fitting name of Don Featherstone. Sears sold the bird for $2.76 a pair: "Place in garden, lawn, to beautify landscape," the 1957 catalog read. Working-class homeowners readily planted it on their modest lawns -- a nod to the marble or bronze sculpture on vaster properties -- and art critics promptly pegged it as a prime example of the despicable spread of kitsch. In the 1960s, the suburban lawn flamingo -- cheap, mass-produced, artificial and unusually neon pink -- was widely reviled as the dregs of bad taste."