Notes on Minnehaha Park for outdoor wedding ceremonies in Minneapolis

One of the best parts of getting married in a park is that the park will always be special to you. Whenever you walk around the lakes, you’ll stop at the Lake Harriet Rose Garden and remember your wedding day. Or whenever you go to the Walker Art Center, you’ll walk through the Sculpture Garden and all these memories about how you exchanged Vows will come back - even 30 or 50 years later. Other sites can’t match that kind of extended revisiting of memories.

Minneapolis outdoor wedding sites don’t permit chairs, though, so the wedding ceremony will have to be a bit more informal. For a 30 minute wedding ceremony, most Guests don’t mind standing up at all, and you can always bring in just a few chairs for the elderly (the Park Service doesn’t mind that…they just don’t want 200 chairs).

Rain is, surprisingly, not a big problem for Minnesota weddings in the outdoors. Most outdoor wedding ceremonies are held in the summer, and summer rain tends to be very quick. Sudden, localized thunderstorms are the norm in the summer, not rain that last all day. Of the hundreds of wedding ceremonies I’ve performed, only three have been rained out. In case of inclement weather, most brides set a time, such as noon the day of the wedding, by which they decide whether to have the wedding ceremony at the park or in the backup location, such as their wedding reception site.

A notable exception is Minnehaha Park, which has a roofed gazebo (one of the three rained-out weddings was held there). The gazebo can only hold 20-20 people at the most, but other Guests who have umbrellas can gather around, too. Renting an outdoor wedding location in Minneapolis is about $200.

The most important consideration is that the Bride is dry and doesn’t have to carry an umbrella!

Wedding ceremonies are usually held on the north side of the falls, but I have also performed wedding ceremonies on the south side on one of the small landings on the stairs (which is a dramatic setting, but will only fit 5-10 guests.

One wedding was at the Hiawatha statue just upstream of the Minnehaha Falls, and that site was picked because the couple were Native American and the statue had special meaning for them. Part of the “Song of Hiawatha” was read during the wedding ceremony.

There is also a pergola on the south side of the falls, and I’ve held wedding ceremonies there, but you can’t see the falls from that location.

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