More than a year after the Metrodome came tumbling down, seats are going in at the new Vikings stadium in downtown Minneapolis.
Meanwhile, the Metrodome’s old seats are finding new homes in venues across the Midwest – and as far away as Oregon.
A volunteer group installed 840 Metrodome seats at United South Central High School in Wells, Minnesota over the weekend, MPR News says. The school bought the seats for $40 a pop to use at the district’s new athletic stadium.
And crews at Joe Schleper Stadium in Shakopee, which is home to the Shakopee Sabres and Shakopee Indians, among other teams, finished installing its seats at the baseball field earlier this month, the Shakopee Indians tweeted.
The Metrodome seats replaced seats the stadium had acquired from the Metropolitan Stadium decades ago.
Vintage '85 Met Stadium seats being replace by vintage '14 Metrodome seats at Joe Schleper Stadium in Shakopee. pic.twitter.com/t9xZW6weU5
— Sabers Baseball 2014-2023 (@tschlepe) December 13, 2014
About 20,000 of the Metrodome’s 65,000 blue plastic seats were salvaged before the former home of the Twins and Vikings was knocked down last year.
And when the seats went on sale to the public, fans and athletic teams jumped at the chance to keep a piece of Dome history.
https://twitter.com/Kylebre11/status/467119468145958912
Most of the seats ended up staying in the Midwest (see map at right), MinnPost reported, except for about 240 seats, which ended up nearly 2,000 miles away in Newport, Oregon.
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How they got to Oregon is an unlikely story, which MinnPost detailed earlier this month. There were some bumps along the way, like raising enough money to pay for the seats, finding a way to pick them up from the Metrodome and haul them to the West Coast, and, with no instructions, figuring out how to install them at the fields.
But it’s finally complete – and when the Newport Cubs start playing later this month, fans will be watching on seats “that once held spectators for the Super Bowl and World Series,” Oregon Live notes.
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