We reserved the Dakota Place Park building for our Dad's 90th birthday party. It worked perfectly…read morefor our group of 100. They have a great setup with tables that roll into place and then lock. We only set up tables for 50 and left 1/3 of the room for people to stand and mill about looking at memorabilia. They have an AV system that we used to show a video of the birthday boy's life. The AV on the east wall didn't work, but the AV on the north wall did. They have screens for both.
The venue is open every Saturday morning to go and look and plan for your event. We recommend using that time in the weeks leading up to the event. We rented the building from 1-6 and our event was 2-5. That left very little time to get all the tables and chairs set up, catering to arrive, set up the AV, etc. If you plan well, as we did, you can do it, but we had to develop a good plan on the Saturday morning strategy sessions. Also, be sure to test your video a few times on the Saturday mornings. That's how we found out, on the day of the event, that the HDMI doesn't work on the east wall.
Some thoughts: bring your own hangers if guests will be arriving with coats, they only have about 10, but they do have a nice portable coat rack. We put signs on the steps off Dakota directing people to use the west entrance, which is handicapped accessible. It worked well to only use one door. Parking is problematic, as there are only about 3 spots, but no one complained. The Parks Department staff are very helpful, but they're not AV experts, and we didn't expect them to be. You have to figure out the video system mostly on your own. We chose not to use the wireless microphone (provided) because we were sure everyone could hear us. However, once we got 100 people in there absorbing sound and making noise, we wish we had.
All in all, it was super. Hopefully they get the HDMI fixed on the east wall. We had to change our seating plan at the last minute once we found out it was not working (the video played, but kept pausing inexplicably). (Oh, and you have to call and bug them after 10 days to get your deposit back...they don't seem to have any sort of system in place to process the refund, but after a couple of calls we got ours back no problem).
Great venue. Great staff. Plan Ahead!