Chicken Boy, Fiberglass statue in Highland Park, Los Angeles, US
Chicken Boy is a fiberglass figure in Highland Park, Los Angeles, with a human body and a chicken head, holding a bucket in its hands. It stands on the rooftop of Future Studio Gallery on North Figueroa Street, where it is clearly visible from the street below.
The figure was first placed on top of a fried chicken restaurant in downtown Los Angeles in 1968. When the restaurant closed in 1984, it was taken down and did not return to public view until 2007, when it was installed at its current location in Highland Park.
Chicken Boy represents a style of roadside advertising once common in Los Angeles, where large figures on rooftops were used to attract passing drivers. This kind of promotional sculpture has mostly disappeared from city streets, making this one a rare surviving example.
The figure is easy to spot from North Figueroa Street without entering any building. Highland Park has several galleries and cafes nearby, so a stop here fits naturally into a walk through the neighborhood.
After the restaurant closed, an artist kept the figure in her own studio for over two decades to protect it from being lost. Those efforts were later recognized with the Governor's Historic Preservation Award from the state of California in 2010.
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