Pepsi’s New Seating Arrangement

Visitors to the 17,000-capacity Pepsi Arena in Albany, N.Y. will have new places to park it following a seating renovation of sorts.

The SMG-managed arena reportedly gets about 1 million visitors annually, which puts a lot of wear and tear on the seats.

GM Bob Belber told Pollstar the arena has two contracts to replace seats in the arena, with the Nickerson Corporation refurbishing the lower bowl, and the Irwin Telescopic Seating Company replacing landing seats.

“The permanent seats in the lower bowl are going to be removed and refurbished with completely new upholstery and backs,” Belber said. “About 6,000 chairs will be done on a section-by-section basis. We’ll have one section that will be removed, temporary seats will be put in and then a few weeks later they’ll come back and put those seats back in and remove another section.

“We also have about 1,500 telescopic landing seats on the first five rows of the arena where the platforms that can be pulled out and pushed back in have seats on them. Those are being replaced.”

As the seats are being replaced section by section, the renovations will not prove disruptive to the arena’s event schedule, Belber said.

The jobs are expected to be completed by June or July of 2007, with upper-level seating replacements in 2008.

The cost for the combination of the two contracts is just over $1.6 million. Belber said the existing $1 per ticket facility fee is covering those extra costs.

– Dana Parker-McClain