See that thing above?

I inherited it from my mother, who passed away in the summer of 2020. When I first handed it to one of my teenage sons, he was impressed. It’s beautiful, he said. But — what is it?

“It’s an ashtray,” I told him.

You could forgive him for not recognizing it. Rates of cigarette smoking have plummeted in the last half century; back in the 60s, over 40% of Americans smoked, but now it’s down to a mere 11%. These rates vary based on geography and educational attainment, but the overall trend-lines are a ski slope downwards. Sure there’s plenty of vaping going on. But the amount of Americans who need somewhere to flick their ash and stub out a cig are as low as they’ve been in a long, long while.

This means that the ashtray itself, as an object, is dying. It is gradually receding from the great American life of stuff.

This is fascinating to me, because I’m old enough to have been a kid in the 70s and early 80s. Back then, ashtrays were positively omnipresent.

That’s because people smoked pretty much incessantly. On Sundays after church, my family would pile into our station wagon and drive out to my Ukrainian-Canadian grandparents’ farm to hang out for the day. It was about a 45-minute ride, but my mother would go through a couple of cigarettes during the short ride. She smoked Export A “Full Flavor”, which had such a short filter and correspondingly intense draw that they were colloquially referred to as the “death pack”; my very-proper, middle-class housemaker mom could have sauntered into any Hell’s Angels dive bar, bummed a smoke, and been confident of acquiring her favorite brand. Meanwhile, my father would light up an El Producto cigar, a dime-store brand that smelled like someone had lit a couch on fire. In the winter the windows of the car were kept tightly shut. When we arrived at my grandparents’ house, my uncles and aunts would all be there, every single one lighting their next cigarette off the ember of the current one. An inversion layer would form around waist height, with the only breathable oxygen being around their knees, and the upper half of the adults would vanish like skyscrapers into the clouds.

So when I grew up, ashtrays were everywhere.

They were considered so utterly necessary, and so central to the functioning of a normal household, that very often folks would buy a standing floor-ashtray, like this …

via r/vintage

I mean, look at that thing! It’s a piece of furniture. This is not merely a convenient place to stub a cigarette; it’s an organizing principle for an entire room — a nicotine hearth, around which friends and family would gather, puffing furiously. I don’t think my kids have seen one of these in real life; they would probably assume it’s wayward part of a cyclotron of something.

I have to admit, though — I’m kind of nostalgic for these imposing hunks of metal and ceramic. The standing ashtray produced some truly outstanding design. I just spent the last few minutes idly googling for images, and found these beauties …

“1960 VINTAGE FLOOR Ashtray”, “standing ashtray / 70s decor by FASE brand”, and “1960 vintage floor ashtray” (all via Etsy)

Back when I was a kid, even the small ashtrays that adults would put on a table were, frequently, objects of astonishing beauty. Because an ashtray doesn’t have to do anything much more than a) hold some ashes, b) have a few grooves for cigarettes, and c) not burn, it offered a ton of design leeway. Ashtrays could be made of a welter of materials, and in deliriously weird shapes. So long as you could ash in peace, it was all good.

So I’d visit a friend’s house and discover something like this sitting on the kitchen table …

“Big Bubble Ashtray Blenko Art Glass Sea Green Early 1960’s” (via The Big Ashtray Museum)

People! Behold this groovy amoeba of 1970s bonhomie! You can tell how much fun the glassblowers must have had back then.

The metalsmiths, too — because you’d also often see ashtrays like this …

“Heavy Metal Sculpture Mid-Century Modern Ashtray” (via The Big Ashtray Museum)

That looks like a Henry Moore sculpture: “The Smoker”.

There was a ferocious amount of ceramic ingenuity lavished on ashtrays, too — and ceramic allowed for not just weirdo shapes but eldritch glazes that channeled the zeitgeist of the age …

“Lou Hoenig Retro Decor Table Ashtray” (via The Big Ashtray Museum)

The zeitgeist in this case appears to be we’re all tripping balls on quaaludes. Or — perhaps that’s not quite it? Maybe this ashtray is more redolent of a Mad-Man-era corner-executive suite, where the handsy account manager would perch his Pall Mall while pitching a Life magazine marketing campaign for asbestos pajamas.

I’ve been highlighting the truly fabulous designs here, but many daily ashtrays were, to be fair, rather more quotidian in their aesthetics. Still, even the very trad ashtrays possessed their own quiet mojo — a sort of menacing undertone of mafioso deal-making, as with these lead-crystal beasts …

Sometimes I wonder if the decorative, artsy flair of these old ashtrays was propelled by some murky Freudian mechanism in the soul of the smoker — some desire to marry effervescent life with a self-evidently cancerous past-time. I mean, even back in the 60s and 70s, everyone knew smoking would kill you. Sure, the science wasn’t fully in; indeed, the tobacco industry was carefully hiding its findings in the basement while bullshitting with ChatGPT confidence on national TV. But on some level, we knew. Everyone had hard-smoking relatives who looked like absolute hell by their late 30s, were coughing up a lung in their 40s, and by their 50s were being hoisted by pallbearers. “Next year I’ll stop”, my mother would mutter as she handed me a dollar so I could cycle to the corner store and buy her some Export As, back when a cashier would hand over cartons of cigarettes to a nine-year-old without once glancing up from her copy of Cosmo.

To our contemporary eye, perhaps the most surreal thing was that kids in elementary school would, as part of arts and crafts, routinely make an ashtray for our parents. If your class was doing a segment on clay or ceramics, everyone would have to figure out, huh, what should I make? A pencil-holder? A paperweight? (Perhaps an even more mystifying artifact, to the youth of today.) Nope. Instead, easily two-thirds of the class would decide that hey: Mom needs another ashtray.

Amy Cuddy noticed this too, a few years back