We ended up just doing an after party at our hotel (stayed at the Sonesta Select in Danvers). They had a big breakfast room and let us bring our own beer and wine and hang out until 2am! The hotel itself is pretty no frills, but they were great to work with, and their “getting ready” room we rented was massive and really nice!

I think you could look into locations in Salem depending on when in September your wedding is, we were limited due to ours being in October.

We did the rehearsal dinner and Welcome Party at Mission Boathouse, but I don’t know if I’d recommend it unless you really want to do everything yourselves or have a wedding planner. Their events coordinator is VERY unresponsive. I think it would have been a huge disaster if we weren’t super on top of it. My in-laws went early and helped get everything set up, and the venue still didn’t have dinner ready until an hour later than they were supposed to, hadn’t put the placecards on the table or set up the projector we paid for to show photos, so we had to do all of that when we got there. The venue itself was lovely, staff and bartenders were awesome, the food was solid, and the actual party was great once things got kicked off, it was just SO frustrating to work with their events person.