The Tent Must Go Up

Every event planner has a horror story — a caterer that bailed at the last minute, cancelled entertainment, lost guests. That’s just part of the business, right? It’s why people hire event planners.

Karen Casey, the owner of On-Site Event Solutions in Nashville, Tenn., knows that taking care of problems is her job. Still, when she arrived at the jobsite for the grand opening of Nashville’s Schermerhorn Symphony Center three weeks before the black-tie gala and realized the showpiece — a 160-foot round clear-top tent — was not permitted, she held her breath.

“The tent was on the truck coming here to Nashville,” says Casey, “and we had no venue — and it was the Friday before Labor Day! This was the biggest bear I had to wrestle in 10 years.”

Location, Location, Location

The crux of all the problems was the site the client had selected: a large grass field in Hall of Fame Park just outside the Symphony Center. For the guests, a select group of 800 patrons who had paid $5,000 per couple to attend the event, the location was perfect: It was right outside the concert hall and afforded a great view of the building their donations had made possible.

Casey saw the location differently.

The park was actually a thin façade covering a two-story, privately owned parking garage. The grass field that looked so inviting was just sod laid on top of a thin layer of sand, Styrofoam and a waterproof membrane. It wasn’t designed for a massive tent.

“We couldn’t stake the tent,” explains Casey, “and of course, with the clearspan tent you either have to stake it or weight it. The weights required to hold a tent of that size exceeded the dead load weight by more than 3½ times. The load was about 200 and something pounds per square foot; an adult man standing with his feet together was exceeding the load.”

A Matter of Time

Why was this happening at the last minute? Weren’t there pre-event site inspections and permitting processes intended to catch this kind of problem?

Sure. Classic Tents, which designed and provided the tent, had visited the site in March, six months before the September event. At that time, a Metro Parks employee approved not only the tent design but also staking it in the grass. Unfortunately, not only was he errant in giving his consent, he didn’t submit the paperwork before going out on sick leave. Fast forward to just weeks before the event: There is no permit, the Parks Department doesn’t know anything about a permit, and when the paperwork is finally submitted, the permit is denied.

Until then, everyone had been operating under the impression that the event was on track. By the time they learned differently, there wasn’t enough time to make drastic changes to the event plan.

“There was no place left downtown,” says Casey, “no parking lots, nothing available. We explored every option, so we said we were going to figure out a way to put that tent on top of the structure somehow, someway.”

Casey’s impressive determination was a must. Aside from limited alternative venues, the tent was actually one of the event’s main attractions: Not only was it beautiful, it was the nationally recognized structure used at Elton John’s Academy Awards party in 2005. The Schermerhorn had referred to the “Elton John” tent in its publicity, and guests were expecting them to deliver.

Problem Solved

Given all the factors, the only solution was a redesigned tent with extra support. Classic Tents redesigned the structure to reduce the weight and reposition its anchor drilling points to coincide with existing support mechanisms in the garage. Still the park structure couldn’t handle the 7,500-pound weights to be used in lieu of stakes.

The final product was a 100-foot-wide by 160-foot-long clear-top oval structure. It was anchored by stacks of three 2,550-pound landscaping blocks to give a finished appearance. What guests did not see were the scaffolding jacks needed to support these blocks. On each layer of the garage, directly under each stack of landscaping blocks was a series of 60,000-pound support jacks; approximately 45 were needed, and they all had to be in exactly the right spots to prevent structural damage to the garage. And, if that wasn’t enough to deal with, everything had to be placed with a crane, which had to be obtained — when else — at the last minute.

In the end, the execution was flawless, and the event went off smoothly. An engineering survey performed after the event showed not a single crack in the garage structure, says Casey.

Dealing with the Unusual

When you get some distance it’s pretty easy to be stoic about even a situation as problematic as the Symphony Center event. Both Casey and Howard Tabackman, vice president of sales for Classic Tents, say it’s just part of doing business.

“There are always last-minute hitches in something like this,” explains Tabackman, “because it’s show business. It’s not something you get to do over again and again; you have one chance to get it right, so you do.”