• Real Weddings

New York is filled with charming nooks and crannies that only a local New Yorker would know of. Like the La Plaza Cultural in the East Village, a unique open-air theater and green space, combining the functions of a community garden, a park and play area, wildlife refuge and performance venue.  It also happened to be the ceremony site for Ashley and Colin's wedding, whose entire guest list was from out of town.
To ensure that their guests experienced some of New York's incredible charm they created a unique and intimate wedding day. Taking them from a public park to a ride on a big yellow school bus all the way to to a Soho Bookstore. Sounds like a fun adventure to us! Read on to hear more about their Soho Bookstore Wedding and as always see more photos in the full gallery here all captured by Trent Bailey Photography.

From The Bride:The ceremony was held at La Plaza Cultural in the East Village. There are so many interesting and beautiful community gardens sprinkled around the Village, and we knew not many of our guests would even know places like that existed. I always wanted to get married outside and the weeping willows seemed to be the perfect backdrop. A close friend of ours performed the ceremony, which made the evening that much more meaningful.

Big yellow school buses took guests to the reception at Housing Works Bookstore in SoHo. The bookstore was the perfect choice for us. We're both writers and love books. We met in grad school and really bonded while working on a project that kept us in the library for three days straight! Housing Works Bookstore is fantastic ... all the profit from our wedding went to support the eradication of AIDS and homelessness in the city. They also have in-house catering that's delicious and the staff was so helpful and accommodating.

What she wishes she would have done differently:I wish I had done the escort cards differently. I put them in this little card catalog to fit in with the book theme, which I thought was so cute. Even though they were arranged alphabetically, it took guests a long time to find their name, and this backed up the line getting into the space. If I did it again, I would have laid them out where they were easy to see and grab quickly.

We spent the year before our big day scouring the used section at The Strand to collect all the books that we then covered to match our stationery. Kathleen of Kat Flower did all of our floral arrangements, and she is a girl after my heart ... the rich, luxurious mix of whites, blush tones and deeply dark hues of all the blooms made the space absolutely gorgeous!

Our band, Roosevelt Dime, set the tone for the evening. Their folksy, soulful jug-band-like blues created the perfect mood. I loved watching our parents dance all night!! For favors, each guest received a book and a personalized bookmark that also served as a place card.

The best part of our wedding was having all the people we love in one place to share and celebrate our marriage with us! Five months later, I'm still looking at all the wonderful pictures Trent Bailey took. The snapshots of those memories will last forever, and it's exactly why we didn't want to skimp on photography! We couldn't have asked for a better evening to start our lives together!

Oh no, the budget! We ended up spending around $40k. Gulp! Our big ticket items were the reception (space, food, alcohol), photography, flowers and the band. Oh, and my dress!! We saved money where we could ... I took a letterpress class and did all the stationery, and I sourced glassware for the candy bar from Goodwill and Marshall's. Things like that shaved down costs here and there, but in the end, we didn't have to compromise all that much, and I'm glad we didn't!

• Ceremony: La Plaza Cultural
• Flowers: Kat Flower
• Makeup: Morgan Gates
• Photographer: Trent Bailey Photography
• Venue: Housing Works Bookstore