Recap... Yesterday's Bump in the Road: Our venue was set to open this month (Open House was supposed to be tonight, actually). After going to the venue's website yesterday, I learned they weren't going to be able to open on time and had to cancel all weddings between now and the end of June due to issues with the city... something about zoning and also about fire exits not being wide enough. They were only canceling those weddings through June 2011: a year before our scheduled wedding. Although it made me a little uneasy, I was going to trust that it would work itself out with plenty of time before our wedding.
Welp... that all changed.
Today's Road CLOSED: If you check out The Historic Stowe Building's website today, you will find that they're not going to open. At all.
Here's the letter today:
Our sincerest apologies.
We have made the unfortunate decision to have to close our Stowe location. We explored nearly every option possible to try and satisfy what was necessary to open the facility in time, but ultimately we had too many cancellations to keep the venue viable enough to move forward. I know it is probably of little comfort or consolation but we have worked up until 9pm on Thursday evening before we finally made the decision and simply we could not come to a resolution that could be achieved in a timely manner, the news media coverage has made it even more difficult as the phone is simply ringing nearly non stop but we are doing EVERYTHING we can to make this right and at the very least help find new venues for all of our brides. We maintain that the building IS safe and would have made for a very fun and affordable wedding. We are working with Jessica at Event Directive to help relocate you to other reception halls/venues.
We sincerely apologize for this heartache and inconvenience that this will inevitably cause. While cosmetically nearly ready to go we are short an additional required exit as one of our two exits is only 24 inches in width and we are required to be 36 inches, our main stairwell is to code, and in addition to a zoning change that we were unaware of that updated on 1/1/2011, that the city informed us of on 4/4/2011, these are the two most pressing issues. We worked with the city to resolve these issues, but do not feel that we would have had adequate time to rectify this before it ultimately was too late for our brides to find the best venue for them.
If you have a photography contract you would be able to apply your venue deposit towards your photography balance as the photography company will remain open.
If you are a Stowe Bride please send an e-mail below with the following information so that we can in a timely and organized manner process your contract. We must have ALL of the requested information on this form. Please send all e-mails to ryan@westbottomshospitality.com
We will be getting our deposit back, but there's no way we are going to find a place downtown where we can have both the ceremony and reception for that price/value (and for 250 people).
...sigh... Guess it's a good thing I didn't throw away all of our venue paperwork when we were cleaning/organizing a couple nights ago.
...sigh... Let the venue search begin. Again.
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