ARCHIVE: Category Archive for: Partners-Developers-Contractors

Our Work At Crossings Hits A Milestone

“Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night….” That’s the legendary inscription on the James Farley Post Office in New York City. But lately we’ve been thinking of carving those same words into the wall of our own fabrication facility, because our guys have been warriors when it comes to installing signage under difficult or even adverse conditions for our customers. For example, the photo accompanying this post shows Glenn Stetzler up in the cherry picker in the middle of some exterior installation work at Crossings. It’s a shopping plaza managed by KeyPoint Partners, who asked us to do extensive work, including building signage, main entrance identity signage, and exterior way-finding signage. We have faced a lot of

In addition to working with individual businesses to handle their signage needs – inside and out – Metro Sign & Awning also offers Design/Build turnkey services for developers. While we’ve done our share in North America (from Canada to Puerto Rico and all over the US) we’re very excited about some of the projects we’ve completed in Boston – including Waterside Place, North Point Residential, One North of Boston and The Victor. Developers tell us they like working with Metro Sign & Awning because there’s no middleman: From initial concept design discussions to sign schedules, permitting, and all the way through to installation, Metro is capable of handling the entire signage process. West Coast Partnership Comes to Boston With hundreds

Signs may be in her blood. Elena started her career managing national accounts at a small sign company in Haverhill, MA, before moving to another sign company in Hudson, NH. Polishing her skills and learning the business, she pined for an opportunity to combine national accounts marketing with business development and trade show action. Just about the time she began to feel confined, she learned of an opportunity at Metro Sign and Awning, and leaped at it. It was a perfect fit. Elena was looking to flex her marketing muscles, and Metro Sign was looking to grow. “We have great people in all the right positions, ” she explains, “and I have all the tools to create my own success.

Our Metro Sign and Awning install crew has been working diligently this week with Suffolk Construction at The Beverly Depot. We’ve almost finished installing the new “T” Logo and the facility’s way-finding signs. Thanks for the opportunity to service another MBTA and Suffolk Project; we appreciate your valued partnership. The new parking facility at the Beverly station is slated to open for public use on Saturday, August 3rd, 2014. It will take another couple of months to finish a similar facility at the Salem station, probably not opening until October according to the Salem News. Together, the two new garages will allow commuters to park more than 1,200 vehicles, which will greatly ease the current parking crunch in those locations.

Working With General Contractors – Our Safety Program

It’s a little bit too technical for the kind of blog this is primarily intended to be, but for a long time we have wanted to write up something about the extensive efforts we make to keep ourselves qualified for work with General Contractors. As you may know, GCs on major construction projects are subject to a wide range of standards and specifications that control not only how they operate, but how the subcontractors they hire (that would be us!) must also operate. If we don’t conform to their high standards, GCs simply cannot trust us with any work. So we here at Metro Sign and Awning spend a considerable amount of time, effort, and resources making sure we’re qualified

If you’d watched us work for the past couple of weeks, you might’ve thought we were going around in circles. And in a way, you’d be right. We’ve been working on another large wayfinding signage project, and the number of details outnumber the number of signs by about a thousandfold. We’re not complaining, or bragging – that’s just the way wayfinding projects (and most others, really) seem to go. If you’d like to see a few of the details and understand some of the principles behind a wayfinding signage project, the AIA (American Institute of Architects) created an overview document a few years ago, which is now freely available. If you have questions about wayfinding signage or would like to

As Shakespeare wrote (Act II, Scene 2, “Romeo and Juliet”): “What’s in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.” But Shakespeare never met a modern consumer, beset on all sides by a wide variety of choices and aggressively courted by all manner of tempting offers. In today’s economy, the right name can make all the difference between one type of flower that sits unappreciated on a shelf somewhere and another, very similar, type of flower that shows up in every suitor’s hand as he nervously rings the doorbell of his beloved. While Shakespeare had some reason to believe in those simpler times that names didn’t really matter much, the Bard of

The long-awaited opening of the Waterside Place 20-story luxury mixed-use tower is now history. The gala celebration culminating the massive amount of design and construction work that began in June, 2012, included Boston Mayor Martin J. Walsh, Massachusetts Port Authority officials, and John Drew, whose Drew Company actually led the building’s development. Waterside Place is the newest of the many residential options now being built in the Boston region. Metro Sign & Awning has been fortunate enough to be asked to play a significant role in these projects. Many developers, architects, designers and business owners choose us to help with signage, awnings and canopies due to our knowledge, expertise, and skill-set, as well as our reputation for getting the job

Anyone watching NECN, New England Cable News, on January 16, 2014, probably saw its featured story on the Boston metropolitan area’s future growth. Specifically, the cable news channel covered a Metropolitan Area Planning Council (MAPC) report on demographic and economic trends, which calculates the need for some 435,000 new housing units – including affordable apartments, single family homes, condos, townhouses, and even something called “micro units” – by 2040 if our region is going to sustain the record of strong economic and civic expansion we’ve establishing during the past couple of decades. Even if we fall short of “strong” economic growth, we’ll apparently still need some 300,000 additional housing units. Various experts and officials spoke about the need for additional

What a great year! Despite all the turmoil and difficulties for Boston, the northeastern U.S., and the world at large, we at Metro Sign and Awning have enjoyed the opportunity to meet the year’s challenges, to grow, to serve, and to do our bit to make the world a better place. Some of our more exciting and successful 2013 projects include: The Forum Restaurant: After the horrific events of Marathon Monday and the destruction that took place outside one of our valued customers, we did our small part to help them rebuild. Working with Boston Nightlight Ventures and the Back Bay Architectural Commission we put together a plan to reinvigorate the remodeled restaurant that included new awnings and face lit