Who made ‘Pinky,’ the screeching bird atop Eagle Rock’s Pillarhenge?

Pillarhenge is an eyesore. Since construction at the Eagle Rock site — so nicknamed after a decrepit colonnade — first stalled in 2008, the only thing that accumulated faster than the garbage and graffiti were the epithets from outraged community members.

While many saw blight at the corner of Colorado Boulevard and Holbrook Street, a local artist saw opportunity. One of the site’s 36 pillars — the tallest one in the middle — could be a perch for a big, pink, screeching bird.

“It was a vision, and I just knew we would do it,” says the artist who goes by Flod and is finally ready to share his story. Flod insists on anonymity because, “isn’t it more fun to leave it a mystery?”

Pinky overlooks workers pouring concrete at a construction site known as Pillarhenge because of its colonnade.

Flod scraped together tomato cages, chicken wire, paper, glue and pink house paint. “I’m kinda into recycling, so I didn’t even buy materials for it. It was supposed to just give a laugh, maybe last a day,” he says. That was more than a decade ago.

One day in 2014, Flod’s young adult nephew, adept at climbing, helped him hoist the 4-foot, about 10-pound papier-mache sculpture atop the 70-foot pillar. It fit perfectly. In the years since, the bird, affectionately dubbed Pinky, has inspired a movement. There are custom T-shirts, multifarious fan art, an online forum and a dedicated posse keeping constant watch. Pinky’s fame grew even as the bird bent, molted and faded with each turn of the calendar.

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As much as locals loathe Pillarhenge, they idolize Pinky. And now that construction at the site of “The One on Colorado,” a six-level, mixed-use development with 31 units, has restarted, the bird’s future is uncertain.

“There’s a lot of love for this crazy bird,” says Jonathan Ford, who has a direct view of Pillarhenge from his backyard. “It’s iconic.”

While discarded elements are through lines in Flod’s sculptural work, it’s the community impact that separates Pinky from the rest. “I’ve done other things I like a lot, but this one definitely exceeded expectations by many, many times over,” he says.

Flod, the artist behind Pinky, watched in obscurity as the bird’s popularity grew.

A reclusive artist steps forward

Flod never set out to be found. He was happy to relish in Pinky’s celebrity from the shadows. That changed in April 2023 when unknowing construction workers unceremoniously removed a disintegrating Pinky from its eyrie.

General contractor Enrique Valdez of Azteca 111 Builder Inc. was tasked with cutting the ratchet straps securing Pinky, seemingly putting an end to the bird’s reign.

Construction manager Enrique Valdez saved Pinky after concerned locals shouted at him when he removed the molting bird from its perch.

Then something unusual happened as Valdez descended in the boom lift with Pinky’s remains. Valdez recalls, “A few people stopped and yelled, ‘Don’t take Pinky!’” The distressed locals approached Valdez with cellphone videos they’d taken of the act. “They asked if I was going to bring him back and showed me the Facebook page.”

The Facebook page — Goodbye Pillarhenge Park — has been the hub of Pillarhenge lore since 2015. No sooner had clips of Pinky’s removal been posted than comments began streaming in: “Sad day for proud bird,” “End of an era,” “The bird was the best thing about Pillarhenge.”

“I didn’t know Pinky had so many fans!” laughs Valdez while describing the predicament he was in.

The community’s protectiveness saved Pinky from the landfill. Valdez deposited Pinky at a warehouse belonging to the site’s owner, showing him the Facebook posts of Pinky’s removal. The site has changed hands multiple times, with the latest owner being Ara Tchaghlassian, founder of retailer American Tire Depot.

“I told him, ‘It seems we have a legend on our hands,’” explains Valdez.

After stabilizing the hillside, the development team discussed remaking the bird with the help of the original artist. But nobody knew who that was.

“People are just done with decades of this ugliness,” says Annie Choi, owner of Found Coffee across the street from Pillarhenge, about the site. “But it also has this weird claim to fame, you know,” she says, as a regular enters the shop wearing a Pinky T-shirt.

When construction manager Enrique Valdez removed the dilapidated Pinky in 2023, it was placed in a storage unit until Flod the artist could be found.

As a career documentary filmmaker, I’m always on the lookout for quirky Los Angeles stories. I’ve been photographing Pillarhenge for more than eight years, largely on black-and-white film. I met Valdez in May 2023, shortly after construction had restarted. He invited me onto a boom lift to photograph the site from above and inquired if I knew who had made Pinky, which he’d removed just days prior. I offered to do some sleuthing.

While I fruitlessly tapped my L.A. street art connections, Valdez posted in Goodbye Pillarhenge Park: “Looking for the original artist to refurbish the bird.” He included photos of Pinky, headless and forsaken, but safe amid piles of overstuffed filing boxes.

Unbeknownst to its more than 800 members, Flod had been lurking in the public group for years, silently celebrating each new mention of Pinky. Valdez’s post presented a unique moment of decision for the reclusive artist: to reply risked abandoning a mystique he’d long cultivated; but ultimately the lure of a sanctioned Pinky reboot proved too tempting to refuse.

Fortifying Pinky, but for how long?

Beyond site-specific work, Flod also creates masks as part of his art practice.

Tiptoeing into Valdez’s DMs with “I may know the artist,” the two arranged to meet at the warehouse where Flod disclosed his identity, declining compensation and asking only for access to Pillarhenge. Pinky’s carcass then returned home with Flod, who set about removing the rotted skin from the chicken-wire skeleton, which he repurposed for its next version, covering it in paint-dipped cloth, instead of paper and white glue, to better withstand the elements.

Tellingly, the exterior of Flod’s home studio is Pinky’s exact shade of pink. In the yard, multicolored concrete sculptures adorn nearly every nook and cranny. Inside, hand tools, musical instruments and partially completed papier-mache projects are everywhere. “Mind the points,” Flod cautions, as I maneuver around an oversize papier-mache mask covered in protruding footlong spikes. “I can’t fix those if they break.”

Skull masks are a particular theme in Flod’s work.

The back room of Flod’s studio is like a butcher’s walk-in fridge, where dozens more masks hang from the ceiling, each more outlandish than the last. There’s a bug-eyed rabbit, a blue donkey and several variations of what appear to be skulls. “That one’s name is Charles E. Fromage.” I repeat the name and Flod adds, “Get it?”

Pinky is not Flod’s first foray into site-specific social commentary. On a hike in 2005, Flod came across a truck tire lodged between two boulders in Malibu Creek. Returning to the site with a bag of cement, he made a mixture with sand and water from the creekbed. After slathering it over the immovable garbage to make it appear as if it were just one more river rock, he titled the piece “Reinventing the Wheel.” Then there was 2015’s collaborative effort “Stella the Steelhead,” a 35-foot fish skeleton stuffed full of trash taken from the L.A. River, which a group of artists, environmental activists and volunteers towed behind an adult tricycle along the river’s bike path.

Just two months after its rescue, in December 2024, Pinky’s rebirth was heralded in Eastsider LA as “a Christmas miracle.” However, a rainstorm soon damaged Pinky’s reinforced cloth wing and the bird was temporarily removed for repairs. It was around that time that Ford moved near Pillarhenge. One morning he went out back with his coffee and noticed something … pink.

“I texted my neighbor and he responded immediately: ‘Pinky’s back! Oh, thank God, I didn’t know what happened. I love that thing!’ And I just went, So this is normal.”

During Pinky’s broken-wing pit stop, my 10-year-old daughter Margaret Green and friends Ezra Cunningham and Meta Nalepa encountered the bird in a nearby driveway while delivering their neighborhood newspaper. Flod, a subscriber, acknowledged he was Pinky’s creator. Margaret’s article, “Pink Bird: Eagle Rock Artist Found,” includes a rare photo of Pinky away from its pillar-top nest.

In response to being discovered by the grade-school journalists, Flod is effusive: “That was a really cool part of [Pinky’s] story. It definitely means a lot to me. That kind of stuff is the whole thing.”

Now, time is running out on the bird as the rising tide of concrete, scaffolding and rebar obscures Pinky from pedestrian view along the south side of Colorado Boulevard. Another few months and …“Well, you’ll still be able to see Pinky from the freeway,” says Valdez, who expects the construction work to finish in about two years.

Someone made an egg to accompany Pinky atop Pillarhenge. Flod promises it wasn’t him.

In Goodbye Pillarhenge Park, one member’s recent comment betrays what many are perhaps not ready to admit: “I will miss Pillarhenge.”

Recently, a giant egg appeared in a nest atop the pillar beside Pinky’s. “I had nothing to do with that!” insists Flod. Rumors swirl as to what will emerge when the egg hatches: Life-size bronze? Historical landmark plaque? While not quite so grandiose, Valdez says discussions are ongoing regarding the bird’s future.

“If Pillarhenge is completed and Pinky goes into the lobby or something, that’s all right, I guess,” Flod concedes. “We need more housing.” Then the artist’s acquiescence gives way to a defiant smirk: “But I want the bird to win.”