Ceremony Site: The Music Stand

Meet the Music Stand. Our future ceremony site.

Click on pictures to see them larger.

Tim and I knew from the start that we didn’t want a traditional wedding ceremony in a church. He’s Catholic and I’m not, and I don’t plan on converting over to Catholicism. Though his mom really wants us to have a traditional Catholic wedding, we wanted something more unique…more us. It will still be a Christian ceremony, just a non-denominational one. We’ve asked my Great Uncle Ray to be our officiate, and now we’re just waiting to hear if he’s able to perform the wedding in Missouri [he resides in Iowa]. Darn state marriage laws.

We knew having an outdoor wedding would be a bit risky in October with the midwest’s crazy weather, but it’s a risk we’re willing to take. We never ruled out an indoor ceremony, but every place I found myself drawn to was outdoors. I looked into a lot of places and we event went and looked at a few. Most of them were plantation or victorian style homes with a yard large enough for a ceremony. I had also looked into several places inside Forest Park, but we weren’t willing to shell out so much money for a 20 minute ceremony. Not to mention all of these places I had been looking at would require us to rent chairs, and with the style of chairs we would want running at about $3/chair it wasn’t turning out to be as budget friendly as I had hoped.

Then I came across this little gem. I had looked at a few pictures online and found a couple blogs of people who had held their ceremony there, and decided it was worth checking out. So that’s exactly what Tim and I did. I pretty much fell in love with it right away. I have never seen a gazebo/pavilion like this before—it’s so unique. It has benches set up so we wouldn’t have to rent chairs. The location is perfect—only 10 to 15 minutes away from the reception venue and the hotels people would be staying in. Oh, and ample parking.

The Music Stand is in located in Tower Grove Park, which was started by Henry Shaw back in the 1800’s. The gazebo was actually one of Shaw’s favorite spots in the park and would watch concert performances there on Sunday afternoons.

Though the benches are starting to show some wear and tear, we should be able to [hopefully] come the night before and move the bad benches to the back and move all the good ones to the front.

A view from standing on the Music Stand. I can literally visualize people sitting there watching us. Makes me giddy 🙂

So that’s one more big thing crossed off our list. Man, it feels good to get stuff crossed off.

—m.