The Green Monster is the nickname for the high left field wall at Fenway Park, home of the Boston Red Sox. It stands just over 37 feet tall and is 231 feet long. A historic fixture at the ball park, it helps distinguish Fenway Park as one of the most unique stadiums in the Major League Baseball. Only 310 feet away from the home plate, it is a popular target for baseball hitters. The wall was part of the construction of the original ball park in 1912 and is the highest among the current Major League Baseball fields.
These high walls on professional baseball fields originally hid the field from external viewers and also served to reduce the number of “cheap” home runs due to the barriers close distance from the home plate. The Green Monster (painted green in 1947) still serves both these purposes. Within the wall is a large window, which enables diners in “The Bleacher Bar” to look out onto the historic field.
A key issue for the venues’ managers was how to create this one-way vision opportunity, bringing the outside space into the bar, without creating a visual distraction for players. The answer was clear, by using Contra Vision®!
Contra Vision® Performance™ white on black perforated window film was chosen with 40 percent transparency to enable clear vision out from the restaurant and was screen-printed to match the exact green of the Green Monster wall. Apart from the visual qualities of the material, an additional benefit of using Contra Vision was its ease of application and that it could withstand the unusually cold spring temperatures of Boston this year with snow on the ground as late as early May and hopefully a hot, East Coast summer.
The material was supplied by Contra Vision North America, Inc., through their distributors Alpha Imaging and printed and applied by Albert Basse Associates of Stoughton, Massachusetts, one of the premier screen and digital graphics providers in the U.S. They won a gold and a sliver “Golden Image” award at last year’s SGIA Expo in Atlanta using Contra Vision, and were pleased to introduce the film to the Green Monster this year.
Ed Basse, vice president of Sales for Albert Basse Associates, says, “This is a great project. We met our goals of enabling a clear view out of the windows of The Bleacher Bar, but the wall still looks solid from the outside. This met the other target mandated by MLB that players would not be distracted by seeing into the bar from the field. The Contra Vision® material achieves this better than any other of the alternatives. For us, it’s also fantastic to be part of the sporting legend that is Fenway Park.”
