Aria Weddings — Venue Closed 2022

Aria is closed, and has been for about four years. The North Loop warehouse at 105 N 1st St was sold to River Valley Church for $10 million on 11 February 2022; reporting at the time was explicit that the building would not be used as an event center after 2022. It stopped taking new wedding bookings then. If you are planning a wedding, Aria is not a venue you can book — and if another site is still listing it, that listing is out of date.

I photographed weddings at Aria while it was open, and it deserved the reputation it had. Two distinct ballrooms — the Garden Room with its skylights and brick walls, the Main Ballroom with vaulted ceilings and chandeliers — let couples build the day around the room, and the North Loop right outside the door put brick alleys, the Stone Arch Bridge and the Mississippi riverfront within a short walk. The notes below are from those weddings. They are a record of what shooting Aria was like, not advice for a day you are still planning.

If Aria was on your list, the closest open equivalents are all still downtown or just across the river. The Machine Shop in Northeast Minneapolis is the nearest match for the raw industrial rooms and the large guest count — up to 600, with floor-to-ceiling windows over the Mississippi. Mill City Museum keeps the historic-warehouse character, with the open-air Ruin Courtyard inside the walls of the original Washburn A Mill. Nicollet Island Pavilion is the one for the skyline and the same Stone Arch Bridge portrait walk. All three are linked at the bottom of this page.