The American Flamingo, Part 2
Victims of Paradise | Diagnosing the nation, one lawn ornament at a time
Hello readers—welcome to Part 2 of my series examining American culture through our lawn ornaments. The series uses the pink plastic flamingo as a gravitational center to explore themes of nature, artifice, politics, and class.
In the introduction to this series, I considered the plastic flamingo as an ambassador to its larger ecosystem—the American front yard—revealing how the lawn and its various decor (the gazing globe, the garden gnome) offer windows into our collective psyche.
Today’s piece refocuses on the flamingo—the real one, this time—flying to Florida to chart the bird’s ironic ascension into a symbol of luxury and paradise.
Good morning, earthlings.
I recently returned from a trip to Miami—my first visit ever to the Sunshine State. While I’m genetically barred from being much of a beach person (my ancestors farmed dirt in the fog), I do like Piña Coladas, and getting smooth in the brain. Miami delivered both in the way that no other city can.
Built up during Prohibition, Miami is nicknamed “The Magic City” for how quickly it rose from the swamp. The town quadrupled in size during the 1920s, as developers rushed in to get a piece of the emerging paradise, and tourists clamored for bootleg Caribbean rum. Drink enough of this rum yourself, and the truth becomes clear: despite being home to nearly half a million people, Miami is actually an elaborate hallucination.
Driving down MacArthur Causeway feels like a trip down Rainbow Road—on the right, luxury villas spring up from artificial islands made of sand, dredged up from the bay so megayachts could swim by. On the left, an infinite wall of cruise ships, each bigger than my hometown, line up to take flyover families to pirate holes across the Caribbean. A paid workforce of palm trees has been hired to pose perfectly in every photo you take, and when viewed from the water, the skyline creates a bewildering optical illusion: that of a glistening empire, floating above the waves.
The American Atlantis? Only time will tell.
Miami is built precariously on oolite and illusions. The currency there is fantasy: Florida’s most potent cultural export, now a defining feature of modern American life. Disney World, Mar-a-Lago, Universal Studios, Ron de Santis: Florida is basically the Chernobyl of make-believe—a radioactive mixture of fantasies and delusion, fictions beaming out like gamma-rays through the culture. In his book Finding Florida, T.D. Allman gestures toward the Floridafication of America, writing that:
If human epochs were organized around their dominant miscomprehension, it could be said that we are still living in Florida’s Great Epoch of Illusion.
Despite being a veritable epicenter of artifice (Miami has the highest concentration of plastic surgeons anywhere in the nation), my friends and I were able to take in some pretty spectacular nature. We snorkeled with seahorses in between the mangroves, swam with a manatee in Biscayne Bay (bucket list!), hiked amongst air plants and alligators in the Everglades, and topped it off with milkshakes at the infamous Robert Is Here (iykyk).
The whole time, I kept my eyes peeled for Florida’s most famous flamboyant cryptid: the flamingo.
As you might expect, we saw thousands. On signs and menus and t-shirts—flocking every souvenir shop, wading amongst the tchotchkes, gobbling up tourists’ spare change. Snow globes, keychains, fanny packs, vibrators. The flamingo is the unimpeachable mascot of southern Florida—your designated spiritual guide to the rum-induced hallucination that is Miami. Like Starbucks or the president, the flamingo is inescapable.
Just don’t expect to see a real one.
There’s a reason the most common species of flamingo in North America is made of plastic. Unlike its flesh-and-blood ancestor, the popular lawn ornament exhibits a remarkable plasticity of habitat, thriving equally well in both urban and rural environments, nesting just as happily amongst lawn chairs and astroturf as on the stoop of a Park Avenue brownstone. With a lifespan of nearly 500 years, the birds are an indestructible beacon of Floridian paradise, conveniently rendered portable and pink.
The real American flamingo has suffered a different fate. Historically endemic to coastal lagoons from the Everglades down through the Keys, the species was completely extirpated from Florida by the early 20th century, as southern pioneers cleared the way for a new American Eden. What was lost in the pursuit of our fantasies made real? And if paradise is an illusion, what truths does it hide? Now displaced across the country, the bird’s plastic descendants live as unknowing refugees of the very place that brought them fame.
The flamingo has been transformed from a victim of paradise into its most popular and pervasive symbol. The story of this transformation is as American as key lime pie—and to some people, just as delicious.
Dinner De-Luxe
In 1934, the Thoroughbred horse breeder Joseph Widener imported a flock of flamingos from Cuba, to decorate the grounds of his new racetrack at Hialeah. Formerly known as the Miami Jockey Club, the track had been devastated by a hurricane in 1926. Widener had hired an architect to redesign the facilities, constructing lush tropical gardens and a lagoon at the center of the track. The birds meant to live there would be the first flamingos in Florida in over thirty years—hunted to oblivion in the late 1800s for their pink feathers and duck-like meat.
The culinary interest in flamingos dates back to the Roman Empire, where the birds were considered a delicacy for their large, fleshy tongues.12 The Spanish, who had claimed the Floridian peninsula for nearly three hundred years, were used to hunting flamingos back home, rounding them up from the lagoons near Málaga. The infamous Lost Colony of Roanoke—the first Brits to attempt to settle America—were known to have captured flamingos during a pit stop in West Caicos,3 providing them with the necessary sustenance to sail on to Virginia (and perhaps the clarity of mind to abandon the colonial project altogether).
Widener’s first flock of flamingos immediately flew away—escaping to the Bahamas or the lagoons around Havana. But the second flock, their wings now clipped, would become an indelible memetic icon of luxury and escapism.
Despite decades of absence within the state, flamingos still haunted the imagination of Prohibition-era Florida, coloring its self-promoted image as a haven of hedonism and pleasure. A decade earlier, the developer Carl Fisher had christened his new hotel The Flamingo, establishing a sprawling pink resort along the shores of Miami Beach.4 Opened in 1921, The Flamingo became infamous for its wealthy and refined clientele, who flocked to “America’s Winter Playground” to drink at the cabana club and swim in its private pool. A few years later, in 1925, a new rail line—also called The Flamingo—would connect Cincinnati to Jacksonville by way of Nashville, bringing thousands of middle-class tourists from the North down to their own exotic vacations.
As the twentieth century approached, a new Florida myth took hold. This was the pretense that Florida was Paradise. Like earlier beliefs, this one flourished independent of reality. Yellow fever epidemics could not kill it, nor could hurricanes blow it away.
- T.D. Allman, Finding Florida: A True History of the Sunshine State
Victims of Paradise
Florida was in the process of a grand reinvention—a bit of a late bloomer, as far as most states go. In the 1800s, as Manifest Destiny drove America westward, Florida had lingered like a stick in the mud—an impenetrable labyrinth of alligator-infested swamps and eroding limestone bedrock, fiercely defended by its native peoples.
The Seminole Wars, fought from 1817 to 1858, were among the most drawn-out, costly, and brutal Indian struggles in American history. Assisted by runaway slaves from Southern plantations, the Seminoles weaponized their intimate knowledge of the Everglades to trap and surprise American forces, often leading them toward hot spots of malaria. While a majority of the Seminoles were eventually exiled to Oklahoma, a few hundred—the Unconquered Peoples—remained in the Everglades, trading cautiously, hidden from sight.
Still, the path for development had finally been cleared. The Everglades’ vast swamps were to be drained, their natural bounty exploited for profit.
The natural wonders of Florida, both fantastical and real, had long been mythologized by those in search of a penny. Landing near St. Augustine in 1513, the Spanish explorer Ponce de Leon set out to discover the legendary Fountain of Youth—a narrative that would later be upcycled by the state’s infinite retirement communities. According to one folktale, upon his arrival, Ponce mistook a flock of flamingos for a field of flowering bushes, christening the land La Florida—the place of flowers.
Canoeing through the Everglades in 1889, a fisherman named George Elliott Cuthbert had a similar illusory experience, discovering what he described as “a flower, a beautiful white blossom.” It was an egret feather, delicate as a whisper. And it would change the Everglades forever.
Cuthbert began shooting the birds on the rookery, killing hundreds on that single day and selling their feathers to milliners in London and New York.5 His success sparked a revolution in women’s fashion, as the “New Money” wives of recently wealthy men clamored for hats adorned with the feathers of herons, egrets, and flamingos. Individual hats sold for as much as $130 (about $3300 by today’s standards), with the supremely sought-after “aigrette” feathers worth double their weight in gold.
By the 1890s, the plume trade had devastated Florida’s bird populations. Traveling through South Florida sixty years earlier, the ornithologist John James Audubon wrote that “seldom have I experienced greater pleasures.” Audubon spoke breathlessly about the avian diversity of the Everglades and the Keys, holding particular fondness for the flamingos near Indian Key.
“I thought I had now reached the height of all my expectations, for my voyage to the Floridas was undertaken in a great measure for the purpose of studying these lovely birds in their own beautiful islands.”
In 1901, legislation was passed to criminalize plume hunting in Florida. A surveyor named Guy Bradley, a former plume hunter, was hired as a game warden to enforce the law. Stationed near the town of Flamingo, he began patrolling the Everglades in 1902. In 1905, he was shot flat dead.6
At that point, flamingo skins were still selling for nearly $25 at market.7 The backlash to conservation efforts was remarkably intense, but continued advocacy led to the establishment of the Audubon Society in 1905, and the passage of the Migratory Bird Treaty Act in 1918. In the end, the plume trade sparked some of the most pivotal conservation organizing in all of American history.
Unfortunately, the damage had already been done. By the time Miami was incorporated in 1896, Florida’s native flamingo populations had all but vanished, the last flock observed in 1902.8 It was not until the construction of the lagoon at Hialeah Racetrack that the flamingos would return.
The Hialeah Racetrack acts as somewhat of a Fertile Crescent in this series—a spatiotemporal bottleneck through which multiple threads of history reconverge and intertwine. It was here that the flamingo was popularized as a garden ornament, and here that the flamingo would meet its future co-star: the lawn jockey. The Hialeah Racetrack marks the flamingo’s first descent into the underbelly of American culture—gambling, casinos, drinking, debauchery. If the plastic flamingo was born in a factory in Massachusetts, it was spiritually conceived here at Hialeah.
Tune in next time as we dive deep into the seedy legacy of Hialeah Racetrack, charting the flamingo’s slow descent from Miami’s luxury resorts into the bargain bins of kitsch.
Flower, H. (2025, December 11). The flamingo’s long history in Florida. Will it become the state bird? | Column. Tampa Bay Times. https://www.tampabay.com/viewpoints/2025/12/11/flamingos-long-history-florida-will-it-become-state-bird-column/
Gould, S. J. (1985). The flamingo’s smile: reflections in natural history. W.W. Norton.
The History of Columbus and 16th Century European Explorers in the Turks and Caicos. (n.d.). Visit Turks and Caicos Islands. https://www.visittci.com/nature-and-history/history/columbus-and-early-european-explorers-in-the-turks-and-caicos
Lousteau, M. (2020, October 13). Carl Fisher’s Hotels. Miami Design Preservation League. https://mdpl.org/archives/2020/10/carl-fishers-hotels-2/
The Most Dangerous Job: The Murder of America’s First Bird Warden. (2018, October 30). Mental Floss. https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/559363/most-dangerous-job-murder-americas-first-bird-warden
Ibid.
Whitfield, S. M., Frezza, P., Ridgley, F. N., Mauro, A., Patterson, J. M., Pernas, A., & Lorenz, J. J. (2018). Status and trends of American Flamingos (Phoenicopterus ruber) in Florida, USA. Ornithological Applications, 120(2), 291–304. https://doi.org/10.1650/condor-17-187.1
Ibid.
Fascinating! I went to Florida for the first time and wondered why there was so much flamingo things 🤯 plumage trade is such a crazy thing