The Little Orange Robot in the Dirt

On a Sunday morning walk with my son I found two orange stick figures scratched into a dirt patch in Fairmount. I had no idea what they were. Reddit did: stikman, who has been putting them on the street since 1992.

An orange robot-like stick figure drawn into a patch of bare dirt beside a sidewalk in the Fairmount neighborhood of Philadelphia

Last Sunday morning, while walking my 2 year old, I found two little orange people living in the dirt. Squiggly, boxy, arms out, sort of a robot and sort of a person.

What made me stop was where they were. Not on the sidewalk — in the strip of bare dirt next to it, the packed-down patch where the grass has given up, and whoever made them had gotten the orange down into the dirt itself. I still don't know with what. Chalk doesn't really work on dirt, and spray paint on loose soil should come out as a blurry cloud, and this had clean lines and a square head and a ladder of rungs down the torso.

My first thought was a kid, and I dropped that pretty fast. A kid with sidewalk chalk draws on the sidewalk, because that's the part that works. Nobody seeks out the dirt. And there were two of them, several feet apart, the same figure twice.

So I took a picture and put it on Reddit expecting nothing, and within a few minutes people were telling me the same word over and over: stikman. Not a description — a name. Everyone knew it instantly.

I had never heard of him. stikman — lowercase, always — has been putting these figures on streets since 1992, thousands of them, and nobody has ever identified him. The ones I'd apparently been walking past for the last 4 years are either spray paint or linoleum tape (w/e that is) - I think there's one like that on Ridge and Spring Garden if memory serves me right Asked what any of it means, he's said there's no hidden message, and that a lot of the point is that the work wears away.

I can't actually tell you the dirt ones are his — nothing I read has him working in soil, and it could just as easily be someone in Fairmount who's seen enough of them to copy the shape. Either way I'd walked that block for two years and only looked down because this one was in the wrong material. Now I'm going to be staring at crosswalks forever.