The renovations at Fenway Park are officially underway. There are two big remodeling projects for the offseason: (1) constructing a new restaurant (called "The Bleacher Bar") behind the garage door in center field that will be look out across the Park, (2) brand new bleacher seats across the entire outfield, that will look identical to the seats that were previously at the Park. There will also be many "second-deck" repairs- replacing the roof over the grandstand seats where it is rotting away, completing the State Street Pavillion, and replacing the temporary boxes constructed for the 1999 All-Star Game with a permanent structure.

As you can see from these photos from misconmike, all of the bleacher seats in the outfield have already been removed. The seats that were taken out were offered to season ticket holders and sold at the price of $550 a pair.

But someone was smart enough to keep a red seat out there marking Ted's historic homerun- albeit not the red seat we're normally used to seeing.

Here's a shot of the area underneath the bleachers, sections 34, 35 and 36 -- this is where the Sox batting and throwing cages used to be before they were relocated back behind the dugout along the hallway leading to the clubhouse. Now, this area is where the new restaurant will be located.

The Fenway folks haven't yet decided if the restaurant will stay open during the games- or if the restaurant's lighting will affect fielders and batters too severely:

"This is squarely in the batter's eye," said staff architect Janet Marie Smith. "We'll have to see if the players are comfortable with the glare. No doubt, though, folks in the restaurant will be able to watch batting practice, and then in January, come in and see the snow fall."

I found this little tidbit, tucked away in the Globe's article, quite fascinating (and by contrast, the article also mentions that AT&T Park in San Francisco is on 21 acres):

The Fenway property, according to Smith, totals 7 1/2 acres, or about half the size of Wrigley Field, home to the Chicago Cubs.

I also ran across this article in Business Week, which talks about the efforts to make Fenway Park as "green" as possible.