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Topping Off Ceremony – The Final Beam Placement

Faculty, staff, donors, and patients and their families helped us mark a milestone in the construction of the new home of Penn State Hershey Children’s Hospital when they joined us February 8 for the building’s “topping off”—placement of the final steel beam.

Dr.  Harold L. Paz, Medical Center CEO, remarked on the importance of the Children’s Hospital to the central Pennsylvania region and the excitement of this milestone in the construction of the new 252,000-square-foot, five-story facility before construction workers and a crane hoisted the final beam into place. A ‘topping off’ ceremony is a long-standing tradition of construction workers, particularly steel workers, to commemorate the completion of a building’s structure – specifically the placement of the final steel beam. In keeping with the tradition, the beam placed atop Penn State Hershey Children’s Hospital today was adorned with a small evergreen tree on one end and an American flag on the other.

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