KTOO-TV [Juneau, Alaska]
23 February 2018
By Carter Barrett, KTOO
At the corner of Ninth Street and Glacier Avenue in
downtown Juneau, there’s a 16-foot column of bronze.
Closer up, you can see the bronze was sculpted into
nine individual pelicans, oriented so they appear to be diving — into pavement.
[…]
Tour guides share one pervasive local legend. Local
Ken Kearny has heard it, too.
“Supposedly, the person that got the contract for that
looked on the map and saw Pelican, Alaska, and made pelicans, although there
aren’t any pelicans in Alaska.”
Another story is that there was a shipping mix up;
somewhere in Florida, there’s a federal building with our eagle statue, and we got their pelicans. […]