Mayor Bloomberg is giving a wedding gift to lovebirds who tie the knot at the city chapel – a multimillion-dollar Marriage Bureau makeover overseen by Hizzoner’s personal interior designer – in a bid to make New York the nation’s coupling capital, The Post has learned.
“It’s going to be fabulous,” said one source of the planned revamp, which will move the City Clerk’s Office – where a major function is issuing marriage licenses and performing weddings – from its current, dingy digs at 1 Centre St. to the first floor of 80 Centre.
It will occupy the offices that once housed the Department of Motor Vehicles, with a fresh look designed by society decorator Jamie Drake.
Drake adorned Mayor Bloomberg‘s Upper East Side townhouse with Egyptian marble, and also was tapped by the mayor to give Gracie Mansion a face lift five years ago.
The city will use the new chapel as part of a worldwide marketing effort to lure marriage-minded visitors, sources said. It’s part of a goal to bring 50 million tourists here by 2015 and contribute to the economy.
“Vegas might be one location where people go” to get married, the source said.
“But a lot of Europeans, if they go somewhere romantic and are coming to America, one of the first things they think about is New York City.”
The goal is to replace Las Vegas and make New York “the premier marriage location in America,” the source added.
Deputy Mayor Patti Harris said the move will streamline the clerk’s functions, and called it “the latest example of the emphasis our administration puts on improving customer service throughout the city.”
The Marriage Bureau, now on the second floor of the Municipal Building, has sterile marble, and the door to the wedding chapel is painted deep red.
Couples sit on plastic chairs lining the walls in the hallway until their names are called; there is graffiti scratched into the walls; and, worst of all, there are no bathrooms nearby.
Sources said Drake, who also decorated the billionaire mayor’s London townhouse, will work at a reduced rate on the project, which has a $13 million budget and should be finished by spring 2008.
The new space will be about 6,000 square feet larger, and will have proper seating areas, attractive marble floors and columns, as well as bathrooms and vanity rooms where brides and grooms can primp.
It will be a storefront, with a streamlined security system. As of now, brides dressed in white must walk through a magnetometer to get hitched.
“I feel like I’m at the DMV,” said one man, who was at the clerk’s office to witness a friend’s wedding.
The bride-to-be agreed, saying, “It’s so institutionalized – not really what you picture your wedding day” to be.
The city, which now is the No. 2 spot to tie the knot in the United States, issued about 70,000 marriage licenses last year, and about 35,000 people were married in the borough marriage chapels.
By contrast, Clark County, which includes Vegas, issued more than 112,000 licenses last year.
The current marriage hours at 1 Centre St. are from 8:30 a.m. to 3:45 p.m., a time frame that’s likely to stay the same.
david.seifman
@nypost.com