How Stoppy became beacon of resiliency
Pennsylvania town fell in love with sign that keeps getting knocked down
PHILADELPHIA—On a busy road in the far reaches of a Cheltenham, Pa., shopping centre, positioned precariously close to the loading dock of a Target store, stands a lone stop sign named Stoppy.
Well, on good days it’s standing. But most days are not good days for Stoppy, who routinely gets struck, bent and toppled by passing big rigs and cars. Estimates for how many blows Stoppy has suffered over the last decade range from 50 to 70.
“If you recall wondering just how many hits to the face Rocky’s gonna take before the music starts … we’re in that neighbourhood,” Cheltenham resident James Montgomery, 46, said.
Yet each time, Stoppy reemerges, like a phoenix from the ashes, ready to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune again in the name of safety.
For years, some residents of have quietly followed Stoppy’s saga. But around the time quarantine hit last year, people began publicly documenting the stop sign’s trials and tribulations on the neighbourhood Facebook page.
“I wasn’t the first to post about it, but the more people started to be angered by things the more it appealed to me — let’s just make Stoppy our mascot because it’s so silly,” said Susan Chelder Schuman, 61, of Elkins Park.
“Let’s root for this poor, defenceless, little stop sign.”
Since February 2020, there have been at least 36 posts about Stoppy, each of which typically gets hundreds of interactions.
Not only did the group give Stoppy a name, members gave it a theme song, “Tubthumping” by Chumbawamba (“I get knocked down, but I get up again”); created a Facebook service page for it; and dressed it up in a scarf, face mask, and a neck tie. Montgomery gave Stoppy a tie in November when it marked a full year without being replaced (but not without damage).
“I drove over, and in the middle of midday traffic, I whipped up a double Windsor on my favourite inanimate object,” Montgomery said.
Stoppy’s been romantically linked to a shopping cart, a port-a-potty, and a nearby yield sign and it’s been compared to Rocky, Mr. Bill and even the Dread Pirate Roberts from “The Princess Bride” (because of its many iterations).
Some call Stoppy “a traffic control device professional,” others call him “a hero,” “a martyr, “an icon,” and “a sign for our times.”
“Stoppy is an anthropomorphized, multi-generational, frequently abused and universally beloved stop sign stationed by the loading dock of a Target that has become a hyperlocal social media phenomenon,” said Tiffany Gaal, 30, of Elkins Park. “As soon as I saw my first post about Stoppy, I knew I was committed to loving that stop sign and loving other people loving that stop sign.”
Folklorist Fariha Khan, associate director of Asian American studies at the University of Pennsylvania who serves on the board of the American Folklore Society, said it’s “not lost on anyone” that Stoppy took on particular significance to people during COVID-19 and a time of extreme isolation.
“They’re connected around, not the stop sign, but the process of the shared art. There’s the verbal lore, there’s a material aspect to it when they’re dressing the stop sign, there’s a visual aspect, seeing it resurrected,” Khan said. “This shared art is creating meaning for the individuals … and it creates a particular sense of identity and belonging that’s highlighted during a pandemic.”
Kurt Gray, associate professor of psychology and neuroscience at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, said people often anthropomorphize — or assign human characteristics to objects and animals when lonely or trying to understand something the only way they know how, through their own human experience. People are particularly prone to anthropomorphizing things they feel have been victimized, he said.
“You see something like Stoppy that gets constantly abused, it sticks out because it’s uncommon and then as it keeps on getting harmed … we can’t help but think of it as a suffering creature,” Gray said. “Nothing makes the human mind try to make sense of things more than bad things because we want bad things not to happen.”
Nobody’s quite sure when Stoppy first appeared, but most agree it started taking hits around the time the Target replaced the movie theatre at the shopping complex in 2009.
The store’s loading dock is very close to Stoppy, and the prevailing theory among members of the Facebook group is that most hits to Stoppy come from truck drivers leaving or entering the dock who either can’t see it or have difficulty manoeuvring the tight turns.
Al Sergio, code administrator for Cheltenham Township, said Stoppy has gone down “at least once a year in the last seven years, easy, maybe more.”
The section of Shoppers Lane Stoppy is on is private property and Sergio said repair and replacement of the sign is handled by Paramount Realty Services, the property management company for the shopping centre. Requests for comment to Paramount were not returned.