If you noticed an inordinate amount of green things — clothing, party favors, fast food milkshakes — floating around this past weekend, then you’re probably well aware tomorrow is St. Patrick’s Day. I attended an Irish wedding on Saturday, and while the ceremony was very traditional and reserved, the reception was packed to the brim with green accoutrement. You couldn’t escape it. Green stickers, green fedoras, green cupcakes, green, green, green.
So it got me thinking a little bit about green.
Our colors here at Penn Medicine tend to be a stately combination of red and blue (for my fellow nerds, the red and blue we use for this particular site are #a80c30 and #154281, respectively). I happen to think they look great together, and I guess most of the world agrees. But there’s plenty of green to be found around here in one form or another, and I didn’t have to do much digging to find it.
In fact, the very first place I found it didn’t require any digging at all. Quite the opposite: I had to go up onto a rooftop.
The Perelman Center for Advanced Medicine (PCAM) rooftop, to be exact. Featuring a beautiful view of the Philadelphia skyline, the PCAM rooftop also boasts a layer of living plants, added around four years ago. The benefits of the green roof are myriad. It helps control storm water runoff, significantly extends the service life of the roof, and assists in the conservation of energy.
Plus, it just looks pretty. And it works so well, we’re using it in other facilities: The green roof concept is also on display over at Penn Medicine Washington Square, which opened its doors in the late summer of 2013.
The facilities are nothing without the staff and faculty inside of them, though, and there’s plenty of Green to be found within their ranks. In fact, a quick tally on the UPHS employee directory found more than 100 employees with the last name Green (or some permutation thereof). That includes dozens upon dozens of Greens, about a third to half that number of Greenes, a bushel of Greenbergs, a smattering of Greenblatts, and a few others here and there.
It’s perhaps only fair at this point to note that the last name Green is, of course, common — and so in an institution with more than 24,000 employees, finding a bunch with the last name Green or Greene isn’t all that spectacular. In fact, according to this PBS-hosted glimpse at last name popularity as calculated by census figures, Green was ranked #35 in 1990 and #37 in 2000.
By comparison, my last name — Press — was ranked #11,800 in 1990 and #8,089 in 2000. We’re building up steam, I guess, but we have a long way to go.
(In case you’re wondering, I found fewer than ten people in our institution with the last name Press. Stay strong, my friends.)
So there you have it: Maybe we don’t fly a green flag (or wear any of those spectacular green fedoras I saw over the weekend), but there’s still plenty of festive green to be found here at Penn Medicine if you just look hard enough.