The Worth Street Wedding: Flowers for a City Hall Elopement

Tuesdays at the Marriage Bureau on Worth Street are a parade. Couples in jeans, couples in full gowns, a pair in matching jerseys, somebody’s grandmother with a plastic bag of rice she’s not supposed to throw. I’ve delivered bouquets to that lobby more times than to any single venue in the city, and I’ve come to think it might be my favorite room to decorate, because there’s nothing to decorate. The whole wedding is what two people are holding and wearing. If you’re planning a small civil ceremony and wondering whether you even need a Wedding Florist NYC couples use for big weddings, the answer is maybe, and here’s how I’d think about it.

It’s all close-up

There’s no room to fill. No tables, no arch, no welcome sign with your names on it. The ceremony lasts about four minutes in a small chapel with a city seal on the wall, and every photo from that day is taken from three feet away. So the flowers have to be good at three feet. Which means fewer, better, and with real texture, because the camera is going to be close enough to see every petal.

For most elopements I do one bouquet, one boutonniere, and that’s the order. Sometimes a second small bouquet if it’s two brides. Sometimes a hair flower instead of a bouquet if the dress is short and the couple’s planning to walk a lot afterward. The bouquet is smaller than a church bouquet, because it’s going to be in every photo and it shouldn’t hide the dress, and it’s built to last, because the day doesn’t end at the courthouse.

What happens after the courthouse

This is the part people forget to plan and the part that matters most for the flowers. Nobody goes home at eleven in the morning on their wedding day. They walk over the Brooklyn Bridge. They take the train to Central Park. They go to lunch in Chinatown, three blocks from the Bureau, then dinner in the East Village with twelve friends, then a bar. The bouquet is in a lap, on a bench, in a cab, on a restaurant table, for ten hours.

So I build an elopement bouquet differently. A proper handle, wrapped tight, that a person can carry one-handed while holding a coffee with the other. Stems that don’t drip on a dress. Flowers that’ll hold through heat and wind and a subway platform. Roses, garden roses if the budget allows, a bit of something airy, nothing that bruises when it gets set down on a bar. And I’ll often make a second, tiny arrangement in a jar for the dinner table that night, delivered to the restaurant separately, so the bouquet doesn’t have to be the centerpiece too.

The dinner is the reception

Most City Hall weddings in the city end up at a restaurant. A long table at a place in Tribeca, a private room in Little Italy, somebody’s favorite spot in Park Slope. Ten to twenty people. And that dinner is the whole reception, so the few flowers on the table have to do what a ballroom’s worth of centerpieces would do for a bigger wedding.

The trick is restraint. A restaurant already has a look, and a small dinner doesn’t want a tall arrangement blocking the people across the table. I’ll do a loose row of low pieces down the middle, in small vessels the couple keeps, a few candles, and nothing else. Call the restaurant first. Some of them won’t allow outside flowers at all, some want them delivered by four, and a few, bless them, will put the bouquet in water behind the bar while everyone eats so it survives for the photos after.

The budget question, honestly

An elopement’s flowers cost a fraction of a wedding’s, and most couples are surprised in both directions. Surprised the bouquet alone is what it is, since a good hand-tied bouquet is a lot of labor in a small object, and surprised the whole thing comes in under what their friends spent on a single centerpiece. There’s no minimum at my studio for a courthouse wedding and I’d be wary of a florist who has one.

What I’d spend on, in order: the bouquet, the boutonniere, the dinner table, and if there’s anything left, flowers for the apartment that morning, so the day starts with something. What I’d skip: anything meant to be seen from a distance. There is no distance.

Delivery, and the thing about the lobby

The Marriage Bureau has a line, sometimes a long one, and it has security, and it does not have a place for a florist to wait. So I don’t deliver to Worth Street if I can help it. I deliver to wherever the couple’s getting ready, an apartment in Fort Greene, a hotel on the Bowery, a friend’s place in Chinatown, early, with the bouquet in water in a vase they can leave behind. Then they walk out the door with it. The one time I did meet a couple at the courthouse steps, I stood outside for forty minutes in February while they waited for their number, and the bouquet got colder than I’d have liked.

A florist in Red Hook I trade tips with does elopement bouquets as pickups from her shop, which works too. The couple stops by on the way, picks it up, and gets a minute with the person who made it. Different, and nice.

Not just Worth Street

Half the elopements I do now aren’t at the Bureau at all. A friend ordained online, a ceremony at a spot in Prospect Park at seven in the morning, under the arch in Washington Square, on a rooftop in Williamsburg with four people. Same rules apply. Close-up flowers. A bouquet that can travel. Something for the dinner after. Maybe a very small something to mark the spot, a few stems tied to a bench or set at the base of a tree, because a photo of two people standing in a park reads as a walk, and a photo of two people standing in a park with flowers at their feet reads as a wedding.

Anyway. The big weddings are what we’re known for. The small ones on a Tuesday morning are the ones I’d do for free. From Worth Street to Washington Square to a park bench in Astoria, the Wedding Florist NYC who takes a courthouse wedding seriously is giving you the same thing as the ballroom couple. Just closer.