Goodbye, Coke Bottles

Those famous Coke bottles atop Fenway are departing.
Fenway will now have a “Coca-Cola Corner” which will boast 412 new seats (total capacity for night games now 38,888) under a scrolling, red-LED lighted Coca-Cola sign “reminiscent of a sign that stood along Storrow Drive for more than 40 years.” (Boston Globe story.) Tickets for this section will run $75 and will have picnic tables. Standing room will cost $25.
The seats are coming in place of luxury suites that were added for the 1999 All-Star Game. Other suites are being removed in other areas for seats that cost under $100.
It’s not very often you see a team removing luxury boxes as opposed to keeping them or adding more, so huge kudos to the Sox for this move.
Still, I’m going to miss those Coke bottles. During a game where Dante Bichette counted as one of our power sluggers (the over-the-hill Bichette, not Blake Street Bomber Bichette) I was down in the field boxes before trying to go up to the upper deck down the third base line to say hello to relatives (and I’m pretty sure it was on my birthday). It took me forever to get there, and I appeared right when Bichette blasted a ball off the Coke bottles, and I had an absolutely perfect view of it.