City Hall wedding/reception dilemma

adranrules

My fiance and I are planning on marrying at City Hall (rather, the Marriage Bureau in NYC), then followed by a reception/party at a restaurant.  Since you can only get married from 8:30-3:45 on weekdays, how do we handle the timing?  It seems weird to have everyone come to the wedding in the middle of the day (those who could make it or take off work), then do...whatever all day until it's time to reconvene for cocktails.  But we're limited by the hours of the Bureau, obviously. 

I thought maybe having the wedding with just parents on Friday, the having the larger dinner on Saturday, but that seems difficult for logistics like the photographer and my hair/makeup (important stuff! Ha).  Or do dinner on Friday, just not invite or expect anyone to come to the ceremony earlier in the day? 

While I don't NOT want people at the ceremony itself, it seems kind of odd to have to kill time the rest of the day in party clothes.  Is attending a short ceremony, then going home to change ok?

Any brides tackled this issue?  Help!

julezlee

We got married at the bureau with about 20 people and then took everybody on a bus with us while we went around the city taking photos. Then, we had a cocktail hour and dinner at Salt. For us, it worked really well and everyone had a great time. Over a year later our friends still tell us how much fun they had.

Goldlie11

What if you went to City Hall at noon and then arranged for a lunch at 1:00-1:30? Maybe you could arrange something with the restaurant so that they can be a bit flexible with the timing.  

sac376

My fiance and I went through the same thing and decided to separate the ceremony and reception. We're getting married at City Hall on Friday with just our parents and then going out for a nice lunch. I'm doing my own hair and make up and wearing a more casual dress for the ceremony. We had a friend volunteer to take some photos for us.

Saturday, we're having a picnic in Central Park in lieu of a rehearsal dinner. It allows us more time to mingle with guests that are in from out of town, and gives our NYC friends an opportunity to see us if they can't make it to our reception dinner (we're getting married over a holiday weekend and a number of our friends have plans).

Our formal reception dinner will be on Sunday at a restaurant in the city. We're going all out with hair/makeup/photographer for this portion of the celebration.  Having multiple events throughout the weekend ensures we'll get to spend quality time with all of our family and friends while still keeping to our budget (Sundays are cheap!) and being true to us as a couple.

Alternatively, you could look into hiring an officiant to have a small ceremony in the park just before your reception. I found this officiant's blog really helpful: http://elopenewyork.com/

Best of luck!

Brooklyn_Moon

Was just surfing for other things and came upon your dilemma. My husband and I got married in City Hall on a Wednesday, and asked our immediate family to meet us there at 10:30. (There is enough room inside where the ring exchange takes place to hold a good number of people. We had a total of 16 to be our witnesses.)

Since we are holding off our reception, and everyone had to go back to work, we made a mini parade out of it and headed into Chinatown for dim sum.

Given the time constraints, you can possibly head there very late (3:45) and be out of there by 4pm, in time for cocktail/happy hour!

(Sorry, I was just surfing this site to find some other information and came upon your question.)

nycbride2011

We are also planning to get married at City Hall.  We've invited about 20 close friends & family members to join us.  Not sure if everyone will make it to the city hall part; but this is our plan:

We printed up invitations for our friend/family to join us-we put 3pm on the invite.  We plan to get there by 2:30 to get through all the paper work/logistics.  We figured if everyone gets there by 3 that should mean less wait time for everyone.  Hopefully we'll have the ceremony by 3:30?  4 at the latest?

We have a photographer; and we've set up an hour for pictures after the ceremony around the area and the brooklyn bridge.  We're inviting our guests to come with us for pictures since we'd like to have group shots of everyone that came with us.  We have reservations for dinner back in Long Island at 7pm. 

This is the time line we're "HOPING" for

Ceremony by 3:30/4
Pictures 4-5:45
travel time back to LI 5:45-6:30/7
Dinner at 7

We're got A LOT of extra time between; but this way we can take our time with pictures and not rush to the restaurant.  and we're gauging enough time @ city hall in case it's crowded.  We realized the date we set was the Friday before Easter so there may be more people in the city getting married than usual.