A digital sign in an historic Philadelphia neighborhood serves as a landmark
November 5, 2015 - Health Care Facilities
Constitution Health Plaza (CHP), located in an historic Philadelphia neighborhood, put the finishing touches on their recent renovation of the former St. Agnes Hospital with the installation of a new digital sign designed to serve as a landmark for this busy city neighborhood.
The 30-foot tall, stand-alone monument situated on the infamous corner of Broad Street and Passyunk Avenue, features a 4'5" x 7’3" 10mm digital sign manufactured by Watchfire Signs. Its visibility to both road and pedestrian traffic has helped define the hospital’s location and unifies all the building’s tenants under one brand while allowing them to showcase their own personalities.
CHP in South Philadelphia serves as a multipurpose medical campus and center for community care. It occupies a five-story, four building medical complex at the former home of St. Agnes Hospital. Originally established in 1920, the campus has been extensively renovated into a multipurpose medical facility that now serves a population of over 1.5 million. CHP’s largest tenant is Kindred Hospital South Philadelphia (KHSP).
The old signage on the building was a logo sign with limited visibility to foot traffic, and didn’t further CHP’s mission to be a community of care by bringing diverse services from different medical organizations and making them accessible to the surrounding community.
“The new Watchfire sign has really helped unify that message and make our presence known here in south Philadelphia,” said Chris Richards, Marketing Manager of Constitution Health Plaza. “With the sign’s 10 mm technology, we can design a clear image and project it up on the screen. The foot traffic and the car traffic from every direction out on the intersection are able to clearly see and read the messages.”
CHP’s largest tenant is Kindred Hospital South Philadelphia (KHSP), a hospital practiced in providing aggressive, specialized, multi-disciplinary care to medically complex patients who require a longer recovery time.
Kindred’s CEO, Deborah Karn, has found the sign to be extremely helpful. “The sign’s clarity and location provides an opportunity for multiple tenants in the building to share with the community what they offer in greater detail. It has helped us, Kindred Hospital, to portray our mission to promote healing, provide hope, preserve dignity and help the patients that we serve,” she said.
The exterior signage was the culmination of a major transformation of this area. “We worked on interior signage. We worked on way-finding in the hallways. Everything was coming together except for the exterior part, so when we got that monument with the digital sign installed it really tied everything together,” said Richards. “This is when the community started to take notice and people started to talk about the building itself. It’s clearly an improvement from the previous signage.”
Richards has started reaching out to the community to offer the dynamic capabilities of the LED sign to showcase community events. This gives CHP even stronger ties to the community.
“Our new sign has helped to unify us with the community around us,” he said. “The community has totally embraced it.”
