Clawson chicken: the bird has held its roost since 1959

CLAWSON. A fiberglass chicken has sat on top of 331 N. Main St. since 1959, put there by a restaurant called Faym-Us Chicken to advertise its broasted chicken. The building has changed businesses more than once since then. The chicken has stayed through all of it and got a fresh coat of paint in 1989. The city's rules for that address now say whoever runs a business there can't take it down.

The statue came out of Ben Robinson's Plycrete Mold Company, a fiberglass shop that ran in Elk Rapids from the 1940s into the early 1990s and built roadside animal statues across northern Michigan, including the giant cow head that appeared in the movie "8 Mile." Clawson residents have climbed the chicken in high school, hauled it off to rival schools' football fields as a prank, and posed their kids in front of it for decades.