Halloween in the neighborhood

Halloween 2020: No masks in 2023, but too cold for just a sweatshirt

It's a very cold day for Halloween, likely to hold traffic down. We'll have no snow such as our Minnesota and Chicago correspondents report, but it's expected to be 35 at 6 this evening, with the wind making it feel even colder. Ten years ago I reported 145 visitors, but last year on a pleasant evening we had a mere 46, and this year we are less optimistic. Between the weather, the relatively low "door density" in my streetcar suburban neighborhood, and declining participation on my side of the street, there's not much reason to draw a crowd.

Halloween at its best is the great neighborhood holiday. Christmas gets more decoration, Fourth of July makes more noise, but Trick-or-Treating gets children, and often their parents, out to meet their neighbors. (Or someone's neighbors... we seem to get a fair amount of drive-to Trick-or-Treating every year.) Like Addison del Maestro, we have neighbors, around the corner on Crescent Street, who go way over-the-top with their decoration, including everyone who passes by in their celebration. "I can imagine being a kid," he writes, "and waiting with excitement to see what the next holiday is going to look like. It makes me feel like a kid."

Emma Durand-Wood writes on Strong Towns that maintaining Halloween traditions through the pandemic helped her husband realize it "wasn't really about the candy":

Now he could see that opening one’s doors to any and all strangers who showed up was really the ultimate act of neighborliness and hospitality. What’s the first thing you do when someone comes to your home? You welcome them warmly and offer them something to eat or drink. Around the world, hospitality looks like some variation of that. So, Halloween is like a neighborhood-wide expression of low-stakes, high-yield hospitality.

Halloween done right requires walkable neighborhoods. You can't do Halloween on a dark lonely street, or on a stroad, or in a large lot subdivision, or in a high-rise. Ironically, however, the biggest challenge to traditional Trick-or-Treating is from "trunk-or-treat" gatherings put on by shopping plazas, churches, and other organizations. I would say you can't do Halloween walking from space to space in a parking lot, but apparently you can. It's just a poor substitute for calling on your neighbors.

So where does that leave children and their families who live in places that are genuinely unsafe to Trick-or-Treat? It leaves them in places that are unsatisfactory, not just on October 31, but every day of the year. And maybe this year trunk-or-treat is the best we can do?

But at the same time, for their sake, and for the sake of strong community bonds that we're failing in so many places to develop, we should all put our shoulders to the job of fixing what makes their places unsafe: providing escorts and patrols; slowing the cars, if not closing streets altogether; building and maintaining sidewalks; improving lighting; building housing that has front porches and windows for "eyes on the street."

Halloween done right is a celebration of neighbors and neighborliness, and faith in humanity. It's a tacit recognition of design that facilitates mixing with others. It's a rejection of moral panics about poisoned candy or the people who want to frighten you with dangers all around us.

P.S.--We were pessimistic about the turnout, as it happened! We had 62 before we ran out and turned off the light, so we could have had more. It was our biggest crowd since 2018 (97).

SEE ALSO:

Ryan Allen, "Trick-or-Treat is Worth Saving," Strong Towns, 30 October 2023

Jessica Grose, "Stop Micromanaging Halloween--Let Your Kids Be Free," New York Times, 25 October 2023

Brent Toderian, "Why the 'Trick-or-Treat Test' Still Matters," CityLab, 30 October 2023

10th anniversary post: Still sillypants

In contrast to 2013, Washington's Stanton Park remains open

DISCLAIMER: Also in contrast to 2013, I now have a son who works for a federal contractor. So this has become personal!

Ten years ago, I wrote two posts about the U.S. government shutdown, one about the difficulty of knowing when essential conversations about our common life are open and fair to all, and the other a pictorial reflection about being in Washington during the early days of the shutdown. "Some people," said a mother to her daughter explaining why there was a wee fence around Stanton Park, "are being sillypants."

That little girl must be 12 or 13 now, and presumably maturing in an age-appropriate way. That is less clear for congressional Republicans. This week I returned to Washington during another game of congressional chicken over federal budgeting. (I'm not ambulance chasing--really! Both years I was representing Coe College at the October meeting of Capitol Hill Internship Program advisers.) As it happened, the threat of a shutdown seems to have been averted Saturday, or at least postponed for 45 days, and anyhow my trip this year would have occurred too early for another round of shutdown pictures.

Still, as close as we got to a shutdown, with the demolition derby that our national politics has become, occupied the thoughts of all of us who take government people. To paraphrase Lincoln, ours is a government of people, by people, for people--so it will never get things exactly right, it will always leave some if not everyone unsatisfied, and yet it matters a lot to the quality of our lives together. Government is not meant to be a plaything, or a weapon.

After our meeting, I went up to U Street NW clutching the invaluable Frommer's 24 Great Walks in Washington, D.C. [Wiley, 2009... this is walk #15]. Jazz great Duke Ellington (1899-1974 grew up here, and for decades it was a center of black culture, even after suffering much from the 1968 riots.

"Community Rhythms" mural by Alfred J. Smith, U Street station

13th St NW: Young Duke Ellington lived here

13th and T: Adult Duke Ellington stayed here

 

11th and U: This club hosted the greats of 50s/60s jazz

There are other landmarks here as well, including a memorial to African-Americans who served in the Civil War that lists every known participant. There also was (on this day, anyway) a young man in a Civil War uniform, expounding considerably about the war and the memorial.

10th and U: African-American Civil War Memorial

Names on the memorial

11th and U: Oldest black-owned bank in DC

12th and S: Wax Abraham Lincoln with wicks for lighting

U Street has gentrified a lot in recent years.

Some of the multitude of new construction

While I'm normally rather sanguine about gentrification, which does bring wealth and racial integration to places, it's jarring to see it to such a degree in a neighborhood so closely identified with black history. At least that history is being preserved.

U Street, too, is Washington--a place that embodies America's ongoing efforts to build and rebuild the good life. Washington is more than the cartoonish caricature presented by so many politicians, like former U.S. Representative Rod Blum, who served Iowa for two terns in Congress, and who is probably best remembered for wanting to inflict a recession on Washington. 

Once you get away from the Capitol and into the neighborhoods, though, you find Washington is full of people, a lot of whom work for or with the federal government, and who are trying, as we all are, to do their jobs.

10th and U: This too is Washington