02.27.08

Thoughts on Minneapolis and St Paul parks for wedding ceremonies

Posted in Wedding Sites in Minnesota at 8:32 pm by Rev. Tomkin Coleman

A bride just wrote to me today with some interesting questions about using chairs for weddings at Minneapolis and St Paul, MN parks. Here’s my thoughts:

Dear Rev. Coleman, thank you for your terrific reviews of Minneapolis and St Paul parks and gardens, and the information about their rental for summer wedding ceremonies! I was wondering if you could have chairs on the stone surrounding the large fountain at the Lyndale (Lake Harriet) Rose Garden?? I don’t understand why you wouldn’t be able to have them there.

Rev. Coleman’s answer: Red tape is difficult, isn’t it? The Minneapolis Parks Department does an absolutely wonderful job with the gorgeous parks in their system, especially with this this delicate, 100-year-old garden, the second oldest public rose garden in the US. I just love the Heffelfinger Fountain (pictured), a bronze and marble sculpture imported from Italy. The paving around it is not all that large, actually, and would only hold about 10-12 guests on the pavement. Most wedding ceremonies are held off to the side, where there’s more room.
The good people at the Minneapolis Parks Department had a much looser policy in the past, but over the years people probably abused the policy, and so the poor Parks Department then had to tighten up the regulations to compensate for a few people being inconsiderate. The Park’s Department budget has been slashed in recent years (as have most city budgets… witness the Minneapolis Public Library having to be closed on Sundays and Mondays…sigh), and thus the Parks Department had to lay off a lot of workers in the 1990s. Thus, the department didn’t have the budget to keep up with repairs necessary with their current looser restrictions, so they compensated by tightening up the rules in an effort to keep repair needs at a minimum. I’m sure the vast majority of weddings would be extremely considerate of any Minneapolis park, but it only takes a few irresponsible people who move chairs around onto the grassy area, which then damages the lawn, which then gets more damaged by the other visitors in the next week, and then the lawn eventually becomes a muddy mess by the end of the year. I suspect that this kind of scenario probably happened a bunch of times in the early 90s, and eventually the good people at the Minneapolis Parks Department were forced to tighten up the regulations. It’s a shame, isn’t it? I’m sure the vast majority of weddings were very considerate of gorgeous garden ecosystem, but it only takes a few inconsiderate people to damage a lawn for a whole season.

And why does the Irvine Park in St Paul allow chairs?
Well, I don’t work at the St Paul Parks department, but I am big fans of their work. I think that probably the reason that the St Paul Parks department allows chairs in Irvine Park is because the park is infrequently used during the week (that’s just my opinion, of course). In contrast, the Lake Harriet/Calhoun lakes chain of parks are only a small fraction of all the parks in the Twin Cities, MN area, but it has literally hundreds of thousands of visitors per year (the Lake Harriet/Calhoun chain of parks is by FAR the most popular park system in Minnesota), but over across the river in St Paul, the isolated Irvine Park hardly gets any visitors at all. So even if a few inconsiderate wedding guests did abuse the privileges in Irvine Park, the gorgeous gem of a park gets so few visitors that the lawn would repair itself pretty easily. There simply isn’t hundreds of other visitors per weekend walking on it afterwards. Grass and lawns can repair themselves, after all, but only if the grass has the time to do so without getting trampled on again immediately.

Just my two cents, derived from my having officiated literally dozens of wedding ceremonies in these two parks. This article is also written with the generous help from my father, who is a gardener and has plenty of opinions on how to keep lawns looking good (thanks, Pop.)

Warm regards,

Rev. Tomkin Coleman
http://www.mnweddingminister.com

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