Love! In The Name Of Stop (Signs)

This column originally appeared on Sunday, Feb. 3, 2008

You will please excuse us if we seem a little giddy here in West Chester. We’ve been celebrating the arrival of a new little bundle of joy that came last month, to our surprise and delight. And not just one bundle, but twins!

That’s right, folks. We have two, count ’em, two new stop signs in the borough. Right there at the corner of West Gay and North Darlington streets, right there in front of the best darn “five star restaurant” you’d ever want to chug down a beer tower in. We are so, as they say, blessed.
You know how we love our street signs here in West Chester. We are proud of them, as proud of them as any parent who has ever seen his or her son or daughter appear on “American Idol,” or “The Apprentice,” or “Cops!” or any other avenue to the world of fame and renown.

We make sure they are kept company with other signs, and even take them down now and then and clean them up a bit if they look too shopworn. When it gets too cold or icy, we have been known to bring them to our homes for an extra bit of warmth. We ask after their health on rainy days, and always remember them on national holidays.

We try not to play favorites among our signs, as any good parent would. We know that our “No Parking Anytime, Anywhere, Anyhow” signs are just as important and special and unique as our “Welcome to West Chester, Not East Coatesville” signs are. (We’re not going to talk about our “Route 842” signs. We understand that they are trying to find their own “special place” in the world, but sometimes things just don’t work out. We wish them well.) But, just as any good parent would, we can’t help but feel a little bit fonder of our stop signs than the others.

Maybe it’s because they’ve been around so much longer. Can you even imagine West Chester without stop signs? We can’t. We even took a drive the other day just to spend some time with our stop signs. In a 10-minute spin around the borough, we counted no fewer than 45 stop signs. That’s 4.5 stop signs every minute, sometimes four to a corner! Did we say how blessed we are?

We have noticed that outsiders coming into the borough jump right into the spirit of things when it comes to our stop signs. Sometimes drivers with out-of-state plates will even stop at a corner where there is no stop sign. We think they may be trying to tell us something, like: “What? You guys run out of octagons?”

Our new signs have taken some getting used to, however. Manys the time we see drivers blow past them like they were not even there. We were hoping that the folks at the Borough Hall would have put up a few signs notifying people about the new stop signs, but they were apparently too busy reneging on parking garage contracts to bother.

Oh well. We suppose that like all good children our new stop signs will learn to assert themselves, stand up and be noticed. When they do, we will be here for them.