We had been living together for 7 years when we got married. Tom was a baby and we booked a long weekend in New York, thinking that it might be our only chance to go before children decided that places like that were boring*. Anyway John came home one night and said he'd been thinking that maybe we should get married. I wasn't keen, I'd never wanted a church wedding and the registry office, which was just up the road from our house, was a tatty old place. I was reading my New York guidebook one afternoon and read about weddings taking place at the Municipal Building. This was before we had internet so after a few trans-Atlantic phone calls I found out that it was easy to do. Time was the only thing going against us though as we would have to get a licence on the afternoon we arrived.
We flew into JFK on the Friday lunchtime, we were the last off the plane as BA had kindly allowed us to take Tom's buggy on board but we had to wait for a crew member to fetch it for us. After getting off we found ourselves at the end of the long, long line at passport control - and along came a staff member who called us forward and had another desk opened for us, a pattern we saw at attractions all over the city there because we had a young child with us. We'd only taken hand baggage though so at least we didn't have to wait for bags.
We got a cab which took us into the city and dropped us at a post office - we had to have the US equivalent of a postal order to pay for the licence and ceremony, a total of $55 for both. From there we had to find our way to the Municipal Building which is right by the Brooklyn Bridge, we found that and then had to get our licence. The reason we had to rush was because you have to hold a licence for 24 hours before you're able to get married and the marriage bureau wasn't open on Saturdays or Sundays so we would have to get married on the Monday before returning home on the Tuesday. Obviously we could've got the licence on Monday and married on Tuesday but we didn't want to risk being stuck in a big queue of people getting married and not managing to do it before we had to leave for the airport.
Monday morning we had breakfast in a diner on Broadway, John asked if I was sure I wanted to go through with it
and then we took the Subway down to Lower Manhattan. What I haven't mentioned is that we needed a witness. I was going to ask a random person and the first people we ran into were just leaving the marriage office after just doing the same themselves so they were happy to come in and witness for us. So we got married.Afterwards we walked over to the World Trade Centre and from the observation deck on the 107th (??) floor, we called our families to tell them what we'd just done. From there we went to Little Italy where we found a gorgeous little pizza restaurant for lunch. After dark we went up to the top of the Empire State Building to look at the city lights. That was November 9th 1998.
*thankfully they don't!
