Put ramekins on a baking sheet. Bake for 25-35 minutes, until puffed and golden. Remove from oven, and let stand for 5 minutes. With a flexible spatula, remove strata to

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These days, you won’t encounter stray chickens in downtown Asheville — just one 10-foot-tall rooster with a proportionately large attitude. The star of local artist Molly Must’s Chicken Alley mural

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These days, you won’t encounter stray chickens in downtown Asheville — just one 10-foot-tall rooster with a proportionately large attitude. The star of local artist Molly Must’s Chicken Alley mural

Arts

Chicken Alley in Asheville

These days, you won’t encounter stray chickens in downtown Asheville — just one 10-foot-tall rooster with a proportionately large attitude. The star of local artist Molly Must’s Chicken Alley mural casts a cool stare on passersby, coaxing them to pause at this side street off Lexington Avenue and wander in. Which is exactly the point:

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These days, you won’t encounter stray chickens in downtown Asheville — just one 10-foot-tall rooster with a proportionately large attitude.

The star of local artist Molly Must’s Chicken Alley mural casts a cool stare on passersby, coaxing them to pause at this side street off Lexington Avenue and wander in. Which is exactly the point: to draw modern city-goers back into the agricultural past of the neighborhood, where a family-run poultry processing plant once ruled the block in the early 1900s. As visible proof of that time disappeared, Must’s chickens pace the alley — strutting, as if boasting what we only partially knew then: They were about to be history.

Find it: Between North Lexington Avenue and Broadway Street in Asheville.

This story was published on Mar 23, 2014

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