Emily Shoyer and Matt Javitt met as children at their synagogue, Ohr Kodesh, in Rock Creek Park in Chevy Chase, Maryland. In 2020, they matched on Hinge, just a few weeks after Emily’s mom asked her if anyone she grew up with was single these days. For the first time in over seven years, the two were living in the same place: Brooklyn, New York. They spent a cold December evening during the pandemic dining outside, drinking hot toddies and catching up—and they quickly hit it off.

In September 2022, Matt asked two of his friends to lure Emily to the Whitney Museum of American Art—a fitting place to propose, considering the fact that the bride is a third-year doctoral student in the history of art at Bryn Mawr College. “Matt wanted to propose at a museum with a Sam Gilliam painting in it, because he’s one of my, and was one of my Grandma Lillian’s, favorite artists,” Emily says. She was surprised to find Matt on the museum’s rooftop deck overlooking the Hudson River at sundown, ready to pop the question. “Our friends were waiting down on the waterfront at a bar to celebrate afterwards,” she says.

Emily envisioned tying the knot in a historic building, and since the couple is from the Washington, D.C., area and Matt, now an ophthalmology resident, got his undergraduate degree at Georgetown, Union Station felt like the right choice. “There was also something cheeky about getting married in a transport-centered space, since we spent two years doing cross-country long distance. This required me to take Amtrak pretty frequently to get from my apartment in Philadelphia to Newark Airport and then to Sacramento, where Matt is in residency, and where we now live,” Emily says.

The venue also offered three ballroom areas that suited the couple’s desire to host a three-part Ashkenazi Jewish wedding for 300 guests. They enlisted Aimee Dominick and Kimber Wong of A. Dominick Events to pull off an overgrown garden-inspired celebration on September 3, 2023, with neoclassical décor elements, kosher food, and a bright color scheme built around hydrangeas. Read on to see the photos of their stunning celebration, captured by Kir Tuben.