Up on the Roof

Rooftop statuary in St. Louis comes in a practical form. Home and business owners often enlist the help of plastic owls to ward off flocks of pigeons. You can see their silhouettes against the sky all over town. But I've noticed a couple of examples of another winged replica that graces the skyline here, too: storks. There are statues of storks on the chimney of Bevo Mill restaurant on Gravois and a more stylized, metal sculpture of the same bird on the rooftop of a 19th-Century residence on South Broadway near the corner of Chippewa.