On weekdays, HudCo is used as a coworking club with good light, a lot of plants, and furniture from Steelcase and the Buy Nothing groups (it’s a high-low thing). The entire space can also be rented for private events, and people have been doing it for all sorts of reasons for nearly a decade.
Below is a partial list of occasions that justify the rental, in roughly descending order of reasonableness. Please let us know what we are missing from this list.
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A corporate offsite. Quite literally the best way to use it as designed, since it’s normally a shared office.
A corporate holiday party. The CEO will say “I’ll keep this short.” The CEO will not keep this short. The DJ can consider accidentally cutting off the microphone. The DJ is on Team The CEO Needs To Stop Already.
A bat mitzvah. A somewhat surprising and lovely activation of the space, even with sixty angsty 13-year-olds.
A seated dinner for forty people who have agreed not to discuss politics. It’s not likely that they will honor this past the first course.
A surprise party for a person who believes they have been invited to a closed coworking space on a weekend. This has happened multiple times already. We wish we were privy to the conversation with the birthday person to see how this went down.
A rigged Secret Santa. Everyone has drawn the name of the same one coworker, although no one knows it. And it’s the one who plans the office holiday party.
A 69th birthday party. Why should the fives and the tens have all the fun? Sixty-nine years is a long time to wait to be the guest of honor at a number that’s also funny.
A class reunion. The venue should be better than the cafeteria, which is the entire point of having grown up.
A 1969 class reunion. Best of both worlds.
A dramatic reading of the group chat. Like a murder-mystery dinner theater, but make it TikTok-ready. The host will read it aloud, in full, from the beginning, in all the voices. Refreshments will not be enough.
A trivia night fundraiser. One team is always named something fabulously punny and the other teams have names that just aren’t that great. Guess who always wins.
A celebration of your own promotion, which your family didn’t celebrate. Invite your sister. Make her give a speech about you—as a surprise.
A birthday party for a dog. The dog can’t come (landlord’s rules), but, hey, any excuse for a good party.
A baby shower for a sourdough starter. Mother, as she is known, has been alive since March 2020, has been fed twice a day ever since, and has by now been divided among most of the Rivertowns. She deserves to be celebrated, at last.