Newark's venues sit at two extremes and we treat them differently. The performing arts and arena spaces downtown, and the hotel ballrooms around them, are built for load-in — proper docks, wide corridors, staff who have seen a hundred backdrops go up. The Ironbound is the opposite: restaurant function rooms on Ferry Street and around it, wonderful for a party and tight for a van, with a kitchen corridor as the only route in. We size the wall to the door in that half of the city rather than turning up and finding out.
Branch Brook Park is its own season. The cherry blossom weeks bring a run of outdoor bookings, and outdoors means ballast, a wind call and a hard rule about what we will not set up in. We are ten minutes away, so a morning weather change is something we can actually respond to instead of shrugging at.