Elevated green

From putting green to ballroom in five days.

What do a golf course and a swimming pool have in common? When it comes to tent foundations, quite a lot. For Party Line Rentals Inc. in Elmsford, N.Y., a tent installation at a golf course for an April wedding required building flooring over the putting green, with minimal damage to the grass. “We approached it as if we were covering a pool,” says Mike Woehrle, sales manager for Party Line. “We used engineered trusses, which take the weight well and there’s no bounce to the floor.”

The tents were set up on the raised floor, which connected with the club’s veranda. Because of the putting green’s slope, the height of the flooring ranged from 30 inches to 84 inches. The crew installed Anchor® Industries Inc.’s tents, including one 50-by-100-foot Navi-Trac® clearspan, one 40-by-20-foot Navi-Trac clearspan, one 14-by-14-foot Fiesta® Frame tent and one 6-by-40-foot Fiesta Marquee.

Party Line’s crew set up two large buffet stations for a sit-down dinner that would accommodate 260 guests. “The buffet stations needed several cutting boards with heat lamps so we drilled through the floor and installed an electric box behind each buffet,” Woehrle says. “That way the guests couldn’t see any cords.” The crew also installed a dedicated electrical box behind the stage for the band.

Changes required during installation included seating arrangements and an additional walkway. “A lot of what changed had to do with table arrangements. What was an oblong table before, now had to be a serpentine table,” Woehrle says. “To us that’s normal—it just meant we had to make additional trips to the warehouse to get what we needed to make the changes and satisfy the customer.”

The walkway was added as a result of a discussion with the dining captain and the club’s general manager. “They were bringing rentals in from another company in addition to those from Party Line and they wanted to be sure items from each were not commingled,” Woehrle says. Party Line added a walkway to the buffet tent so that its china could be taken to a separate storage tent. Because the walkway was also on a raised floor, covered with a tent and heated, when the door opened to the main tent no cold air entered the main tent.

Though the day of the event was sunny, the days preceding were cold and rainy, which made installation challenging. “Weather like that slows the installers down. You can only work so fast when you get cold,” Woehrle says. “The club was accommodating though. They would let us go inside to warm up and
the club manager made sure there was coffee and hot chocolate for us in the afternoon.”

Party Line had staff on-site on the day of the wedding reception to handle any unexpected incidents. “The only thing we needed to do during the event was adjust the heat now and then, which was pretty minor,” Woehrle says. “This was a terrific team effort on everyone’s part.”