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A Historic High-rise Changeover Franchise
By Jeff Wooten
On July 4, the Philadelphia Electric and Gas Company (PECO) officially turned on 118 LED columns encircling the top of its twenty-nine story building in an effort to help customers become more environmentally responsible. (The new display replaced the high-voltage Crown Lights incandescent lamp message system that had been in operation since 1976.) PECO’s intent is to use this energy-efficient display for full-color community service announcements and media content using video images and text.
YESCO fabricated the individual columns. (Each column is comprised of four separate cabinet sections and measures two-feet wide by 40-feet tall by eight-inches deep.) The total number of LEDs used in this project adds up to over 2,000,000. However, the details behind its installation is a story unto itself—one filled with dizzying heights, a cast of dozens, and old-fashioned sign ingenuity.
Eastern Sign Tech in Burlington, New Jersey handled the installation of this historic PECO lighting changeover. “At times we had up to seventeen guys on the job site at once. We probably had twenty-five various guys in and out of there,” says Barry Belsky, special projects manager at Eastern Sign Tech (EST). (Note: Belsky adds that Jamil Halstead is installation and service general manager at EST, but due to the size and scope of this project, he acted as field supervisor and coordinated the daily workings of the job and the manpower. “He was an active manager,” says Belsky, “having installed and wired up a large portion of the project himself.”)
The installation process began when the YESCO-shipped crates arrived at Eastern Sign Tech’s location in Burlington. (Note: A second facility is located in Atlantic City, New Jersey.) After unpacking the crates and removing the LED panels, employees loaded the signs into the company’s box truck.
At the job site, EST had to park its truck in the garage under the building—even when the building was open. “We only had a little corner of the parking garage. They didn’t allocate us anything,” says Belsky.
Eastern Sign Tech used the service elevator to hand-deliver the LED panels to the twenty-seventh, where they were temporarily stored in the mechanical room. “Sometimes we had six guys devoted to just moving stuff up and down,” says Belsky. “We were able to fit two to three pieces max at a time in the elevator.”
Next EST moved the signs, using a winch, from the mechanical room to an area where the ceiling was open. The installers then hoisted the signs up to the twenty-ninth floor for another temporary storage.
EST custom-built a rig in order to deliver the panels up to the roof. “One of the main challenges was getting the items on the roof because it was a glass building and we weren’t allowed to bring them up off of the street or on the side,” says Belsky. “That was a huge challenge, especially because when we got up to the top of the building we had to hoist them up through the roof via a hole in the roof. We built a custom rig to hoist them from the top floor to the roof and then built another rig to drop them over the side of the building for installation.”
Even though EST used a permanent window-washer scaffold for placement, to save time from having to do only one panel at a time, they also ended up installing six or seven additional swing stages just to have each drop covered. “We built aluminum structures with turn arms to basically hook up the thing, lift it up, turn it over the wall, and lower it back down to be installed,” explains Belsky, who says the rigs were built in response to a pre-site survey they performed.
Eastern Sign Tech was able to retrofit the structure from the old lighting system in order to attach the LED panels. “It was forty-foot tall and had ankle rails that were built to fit right over the old one. We then bolted them to the old system,” says Belsky.
The final display is made up of two screens along the top of the four-sided building, and their placement was determined by traffic and visibility. “Since each screen is two sides of the building, there’s a ‘turn’ in the graphics,’” explains Belsky. “The opposite two corners show the exact same thing.”
It took three to four weeks to remove the old lights and then another three months for EST to install the display. “We had to be done by June 1 to give them enough time to make sure everything worked,” says Belsky.
Belsky credits the company’s specialty in high-rise applications for helping them perform a top-notch installation at the PECO building. “We service a lot of casinos in Atlantic City, so we’re constantly working at heights,” he says. “We do high-rise work for a lot of local companies because not everybody has guys who know what they’re doing 300 feet in the air.”
Although the project ended up being harder to install than Belsky had originally imagined, he’s especially proud of the end-result. “[The display] is the only thing in the Philadelphia skyline like it. It stands out from miles away,” he says. “It’s not like Times Square, where it’s ‘one of a million’; this is ‘one of one’ in the city of Philadelphia. At night, it’s amazing and really stands out.”
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