I've always had a soft spot for plastic pink flamingos

"The Tacky History of the Pink Flamingo" from Smithsonian Magazine:

First designed in 1957, the fake birds are natives not of Florida but of Leominster, Massachusetts, which bills itself as the Plastics Capital of the World. At a nearby art school, sculptor Don Featherstone was hired by the plastics company Union Products, where his second assignment was to sculpt a pink flamingo. No live models presented themselves, so he unearthed a National Geographic photo spread. It took about two weeks to model both halves of the bird, brought into the third dimension by then-revolutionary injection-mold technology.

A flamingo-friendly trend was the sameness of post-World War II construction. Units in new subdivisions sometimes looked virtually identical. "You had to mark your house somehow," Featherstone says. "A woman could pick up a flamingo at the store and come home with a piece of tropical elegance under her arm to change her humdrum house." Also, "people just thought it was pretty," adds Featherstone's wife, Nancy.

For more reading, Jennifer Price has a great essay collection* about nature and American culture that includes a piece on plastic pink flamingos, Flight Maps. There's a Q&A with her on the subject here. You can also read a non-flamingo piece she wrote for The Believer, (full text!) a few years ago, "Thirteen Ways of Seeing Nature in LA".

*I've got in on my shelf!