Shots From This Year's NY Halloween Parade: Why Doesn't Pittsburgh Do This?

Sorry this post is so late, I'm still getting stuff off my camera from more than a month ago.

The Halloween Parade, now is close to being one of it's biggest single, one day events in NYC. The Parade itself must draw about 2-3 million onlookers and perhaps 50-100 thousand participants. This alone, might not make it that unusual in a very dense, transit oriented city where several parades draw huge crowds, but it's only part of a vast night of reveling and madness that overtakes almost all of downtown Manhattan. My guess is that 5 million people or so may be partaking in some way.

I stopped taking pictures pretty early and many are blurry, but I think they capture the spirit. We also didn't stay out late, when some of the more extreme insanity happens.









Unlike most, this parade lacks single large sponsors or much of a formal organizing committee. Started sometime in the late 70's or early 80's, it originally went through the narrow streets of The West Village, graduating to 6th ave around 1989.

As near as we can tell, anyone in a costume can march, but procession is semi organised in a staging area, and the major floats, large scale puppets and dance groups have an assigned sequence.

I wonder, why Pittsburgh has never gotten together a free form Halloween Parade like this? Bloomfield's does look like something just for small kids.