Wedding Date on Oct 1, 2016

From the bride: When we were dating, Vincent had to drive many, many times from his home in New Jersey, over the Brooklyn Bridge (often sitting in traffic), to my home in Brooklyn. So when it came time for planning our wedding, we thought that the Brooklyn Bridge needed to be a part of it somehow. We were each raised in traditional, Italian families, where our family gatherings and weddings pretty much all take place the same few catering halls. The thought of doing something different and gasp, a Manhattan wedding, seemed out of the question, and the budget. Luckily, I have an event production background and Vincent is a whiz at crunching numbers. In my obsession with New York City architecture, I learned of the Surrogate's Courthouse, which is a familiar building in a very obvious location right over the Brooklyn Bridge at 31 Chambers Street in Manhattan that many New Yorkers, including myself, have passed by thousands of times without knowing its history or its breathtaking interior. To me, finding something unknown in a city so populated, where everything has already been discovered, makes the hidden gems that much more special. Because the Surrogate's Courthouse is used for local government events and corporate holiday parties, they were less thrilled about hosting 300 of our closest family members but we somehow convinced them to agree to our big fat Italian wedding. I later learned that the Surrogate’s Courthouse was often used for filming Law & Order, which is Vincent’s favorite TV show. Once I told him about that, there was no turning back. Days after our wedding, the Surrogate’s Courthouse was indefinitely closed for renovations. Our wedding was the last event there which makes our memory of that night feel like it's frozen in time.