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Soaring Signage

American Eagle’s media facade is topped by a rooftop sign and a sign tower that lift the brand into the Times Square syline.

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Located literally in the center of Times Square, near the Bowtie, where Broadway crosses Seventh Ave., the former Times Square Howard Johnson site now houses the new American Eagle building. Its media facade is topped by a rooftop sign and a sign tower that lift the American Eagle brand into the Times Square skyline.
Altogether, 12 display surfaces are covered with Barco LED tiles, including T-20 LED tiles and, for the ceiling, Olite 612 LED tiles. The building signage faces all four directions.
The Barnycz Group (Baltimore) designed the entire media facade and instore, digital-media display systems. The team also develops and manages the media-facade content.
Company president Danny Barnycz said the building’s signage is divided into four, separate, vertical display zones, each defined by the building’s elevation. The street level utilizes a bank of 21 Barco NSL-46 LCD monitors, arranged in a 3 x 6 array for window displays; a second-level zone includes a “projected” sign that extends from the building’s entire east and south sides; the third level is the rooftop sign; and, at the final level, stands the 120-ft.-tall sign tower.
R. Scott Lewis designed the building’s sign structures for the media facades and its rooftop and sign-tower displays. He incorporated large dunnage beams as a unified structure on the roof to distribute the forces from the sign structures to the building columns. Then, the sign tower and the rooftop sign were connected to the dunnage beams. The media-facade support structure, which projects 10 ft. from the building, was connected to the building columns by a series of stubouts that were shop-welded to the columns. After the storefront was built around the stub-outs, the sign structures were bolted to the stubouts.
Once the sign structure was completed, North Shore Neon Sign Co. (Deer Park, NY) hung the Barco LED tiles along each of the sign-structure components. Alex Robson, North Shore Neon’s project manager, said at least 1,469 Barco LED tiles were installed in their appropriate sign frames at the North Shore, Long Island facility. Specific groups of frames were then trucked every night, for at least two months, into Times Square for final placement on the American Eagle building.
Despite the challenges of dealing with the new Times Square pedestrian mall, and the intricacies of mounting the LED frames (which totaled 14,660 sq. ft.) along the entire building facade and sign tower, North Shore successfully mounted all the LED frames across the entire sign structure.
Barnycz noted the diverse content featured on the American Eagle sign for its four client brands: American Eagle, Aerie, 77 Kids and Martin+Osa. American Eagle will share its media-facade display with a select group of third-party advertisers who fit into the brand’s core demographic.
With the American Eagle building, Lewis said, “We now have a very dramatic, mid-point sign structure in the center of Times Square that’s going to change the look and direction of advertising coming from that part of the Times Square courtyard.”

Getting it on with Times Square
A Times Square digital-signage trend – “reacting” to its surrounding public space. In a recent promotion for Toyota’s Prius, both the Reuter’s and NADAQ digital screens serve, through a software application, as a giant etch-a-sketch board. Nearby pedestrians can use their cellphone to call a special phone number and create a simple, continuous line drawing on their cellphone screen that can interact with the Prius. The customer then submits the image to the big boards for display consideration. Talk about engagement.
Also, the American Eagle sign tower will display a customer’s image when he or she makes a store purchase. Successive pictures will bump it down the tower. With all the retail business expected during the end-of-year holidays, the building will display a parade of happy customers, who are getting a few seconds of fame on Times Square’s latest media façade.
 

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