World's Largest Pop Bottle and Store

Arcadia, Oklahoma

In 2007 a minimalist 66-foot-tall soda bottle sculpture named "Bubbles," and an accompanying soda-centered roadhouse named "Pops," debuted on Route 66. They were deigned by Oklahoma City architect Rand Elliott, and the vision of fracking billionaire Aubrey K. McClendon, who owned much of the surrounding land.

Bubbles is made out of stacked steel hoops augmented with thousands of color-shifting LEDs -- one of the first pieces of public art to use this after-dark gimmickry. Pops is known for its selection of over 700 varieties of soda, sparkling water, and other bottled refreshment. When we asked Pops' marketing director how some of the obscure and hard-to-find beverage brands were chosen, she answered, "We Googled a lot."

The pyramid-angled windows of Pops are lined with shelves of bottled soda, glued down to prevent accidents, in a variety of colors. Sunlight streaming through the soda creates an effect similar to stained-glass windows.

McClendon, age 56, was reportedly on his way to Pops when he crashed his car head-on into a bridge abutment on March 2, 2016. The previous day, he'd been indicted by a federal grand jury for conspiring in a bid rigging scheme in the purchase of oil and natural gas leases. McClendon was traveling an estimated 88 mph and wasn't wearing a seat belt, but friends and local officials insisted that his death wasn't a suicide. They said that McClendon was just a really bad, reckless diver.

Soda pop display (glued in place).