Crowd looks on as Children’s Hospital is “topped off”

For weeks, a pair of plain white steel beams have been collecting signatures of patients, staff, students, volunteers, donors and community members. On Oct. 24, the beams were hoisted into the air by a crane, then carefully lowered and guided into place atop Penn State Health Children’s Hospital.

The “topping off” ceremony marked the completion of the steel structure that will house the building’s three-floor expansion. The project, which is expected to be complete by 2020, amounts to a 126,000-square-foot addition.

It will provide space for a new labor and delivery unit and post-partum patient rooms, as well as a new neonatal intensive care unit — all of which will be moved from their current locations in the adult hospital. The addition also will include an 18-bed pediatric acute care unit.

Learn more about the project here.

A “topping off” ceremony is a long-standing tradition of construction workers, particularly steel workers, to commemorate the completion of a building‘s structure.

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