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.