Halloween Parade

Ours of course is not the only Halloween Parade in town. Out of towners, especially, will probably have heard only of the larger parade in our more ostentatious neighboring borough across the river. That’s good enough for us! What we lack in fame we more than make up for in a most impressive array of pint-sized witches and goblins -often accompanied by their proud parents as well as their family pets in unusual attire.

What’s your favorite part of Halloween in Park Slope? Is it the after-school trick-or- treating along 7th Avenue and 5th Avenues, where we take advantage of the shopkeepers for yet another year? Could it be the Headless Horseman, rumored to be a charming woman named Fran from Kensington Stables underneath that scary exterior? Maybe it’s the in-line skaters, swooping ahead of the parade and looking like Black Bloc anarchists? Or is it the jazzy beat of Paprika, surely one of the more colorful bands in the whole city, or of one of the other bands that joins in from year to year? For some it might be the animal companions in scary attire, together with their FIDO host humans. Or is it the parade itself?

The Parade continues to evolve, although thankfully at an appropriately glacial pace. It has already spawned several subsidiary traditions, such as the Black Light Puppet Show, a production of Theatre Group Dzieci, held each Halloween evening in Garfield Place. Several other local theater groups make irregular appearances in the Parade from year to year.