COCK OF THE WALK.

Byline: Randi Bjornstad The Register-Guard

If he's bothered by the ghosts of chickens past, the Fifth Street Public Market's new rooster-in-residence doesn't show it.

Of course, Bach - a gloriously glossy black rooster with a mop-top of white feathers and sleek, silvery-black legs a tap dancer might envy - doesn't have to fear the fate of his predecessors. He's no run-of-the-mill chicken, nor do the chichi shops of today's market bear any resemblance to the Swift Co. Poultry Plant that processed lesser fowl on the premises for long-ago Sunday dinners.

No, Bach spends his days however he wants: strutting around the market's newly refurbished brick fountain, grandly accepting pats from passing patrons and stretching majestically for a periodic cock-a-doodle-doo.

He came to the popular downtown shopping spot "almost as a joke, really," says Dana Howe, the facility's marketing director.

The recently completed $4 million renovation of the upscale shopping arena offers a homage to its utilitarian past, with a huge rooster portrait mounted high on the Sixth Avenue and High Street corner of the building and a tasteful bronze chicken statue called "Swifty" atop the fountain in the lower-level courtyard.

But even that wasn't enough for former Eugene City Manager Mike Gleason, who attended a private grand opening the night before the real thing.

`He said, `Don't you think it would be a good idea to have your own real chicken?' ' Howe recalls. "And the next morning, he called - he was on his way down here with the rooster in the back seat of his car."

Market owner Brian Obie and his staff didn't cluck at the gift. They brought in a wood-and-wire coop for night roosting and quickly put together a contest to select a name.

A panel of judges selected Bach from a Top-20 list, the market's Web site says, because they "found this name pleasingly fitting due to the Bach Festival and because `bach' is the sound he makes." When he's not crowing, of course.

Bach spent his earliest days as a science project in a Portland preschool classroom. Once he started taking on the characteristics of a real rooster, he went back to the hatchery, where Gleason's wife came across him and took him in.

The rooster has taken to the public market and its human visitors like a duck to water. Many people walk by as the rooster roots around in a flower bed, stop quickly to give him a pat on the head and then continue on their way, Howe says.

Pat Curtin, a newly arrived professor of public relations in the University of Oregon's journalism school, hasn't found her way to the public market yet but says she's not surprised to hear that the rooster already has become a draw for shoppers there.

"Having an animal that becomes something of a pet certainly can give people more of a connection" to a commercial establishment, as long as it clearly receives good treatment, Curtin says. "And I'd have to say, as a marketing tool, kids and animals still work."

Especially together. On Wednesday afternoon, 16-month-old Sebastian Bertrand raced into the courtyard to search for the bird, his mother close behind.

"We come every week, for pizza and the rooster," Anahid Bertrand says, adding that the toddler and the rooster have something in common.

"Both were named after my first love," Bertrand says with a laugh.

"I'm a piano teacher, so I named my child after my favorite composer. So I'm happy the chicken was named after him, too."