Pink Steel for Breast Cancer Awareness

It’s rare that a construction project creates awareness for a disease, but that’s what happened in 2012. It was a first for O’Shea.

The company was constructing a 132,000-square-feet, four-story expansion of Springfield Clinic on First Street, across from Memorial Medical Center. It would house Springfield Clinic’s Cancer Center, along with other specialty departments. When O’Shea and the Clinic realized construction would be at the steel frame stage by October, which is Breast Cancer Awareness Month, Tom Fitch with O’Shea  thought it would be great to show support for breast cancer patients and survivors by using pink steel, to represent the strength of those affected by the disease.

But who makes pink steel?

Springfield’s Selvaggio Steel was the steel fabricator for the project. It painted the metal a bright pink and as the structure went up, it became known as the “pink building,” which drew a lot of attention. The Clinic and O’Shea held a big event that October for about 800 patients, survivors and their loved ones, companies involved with the construction, and local dignitaries. Selvaggio Steel got special t-shirts for the event, transported their employees to it, and closed shop for the day.

Attendees signed a pink beam for the infrastructure and a beam specially constructed to look like a six-foot, pink ribbon -- a symbol of breast cancer awareness. “With people signing in honor of loved ones who had passed or were currently fighting cancer, pink steel became more than the strength of those who got up and fought cancer every day; it also became the strength of the support system holding those survivors and patients up,” states an article on the Springfield Clinic website. One woman signed, “I will survive!!”

The American Institute of Steel Construction wrote a magazine feature about the “pink steel” building.

Although most of the pink steel is now hidden from sight in the infrastructure, some remains visible to inspire and inform. According to the Clinic’s article: “The six-foot pink steel ribbon from the event is displayed in the first-floor lobby at the 900 building every October. A second pink steel ribbon that went ‘on tour’ in 2013 to get signed from people all over central Illinois is permanently displayed at Springfield Clinic’s Center for Plastic Surgery.”