Fear Not! Village Halloween NYC Parade 2009 Insider's Guide
Don't get stuck! Seriously. Follow our advice and have a great Halloween NYC Parade experience. Time your travel and know which streets to avoid while catching the most wild and exciting people and costumes. Read on for the low down on the craziest night of the year! MORE »Top 20 Halloween NYC Parties: Open Bars & Swanky Clubs
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Get the inside scoop on where to buy the best Halloween NYC costumes at the best prices. We have negotiated with local costume shops to save you money!!!! Whether you are a hot zombie nurse or a pirate wench -- we've got you covered, well for some of you -- uncovered. MORE »Top Rated 2010 NYC Halloween Parties & NYC Halloween Events (Powered By Joonbug)
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Rated #1 Halloween Party in the Country. Get your tickets while you still can!
Limited Time Offer. Current Prices:
General Admission
$ 20
VIP Access
$ 50
Gold Bottle Package for 4
$ 350
Gold Bottle Package for 6
$ 700
Gold Bottle Package for 8
$ 1025
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Limited Time Offer. Current Prices:
General Admission
$ 10
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Limited Time Offer. Current Prices:
General Admission
$ 15
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Limited Time Offer. Current Prices:
After 1AM Admission
$ 5
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Limited Time Offer. Current Prices:
General Admission
$ 15
Silver Bottle Package
$
Gold Bottle Package
$
Platinum Bottle Package
$
Triple Diamond Package
$
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NYC Village Halloween Parade 2009
NYC Halloween Parade Overview
For all those in costume is on 6th Avenue South of Spring Street and North of Canal between 6:30 and 8:30 p.m.
Alert ! ONLY enter the line-up on 6th Ave. from the East and South between Canal and Spring.
Watch it in person on 6th Avenue from Spring Street to 21st Street from 7 - 10 p.m. Live on NY 1 Television from 8 - 9:30 p.m.
Halloween NYC Parade Route
If you are coming in a group, meet somewhere away from the Line-up and walk to the line-up together.
The Parade takes until 8:15 to move out. Join the Parade at the beginning and approach the Line-up only from the South and the East.
Streets West of 6th are closed by the Police.
Take These Trains To These Stations
| A | West 4 Street |
| C, E | West 4 Street, Spring Street |
| B, D | West 4 Street, Broadway/Lafayette St. |
| F | 23 St, 14 St, West 4 St. B'way/Lafayette St. |
| N, R | 23 St, 14.Union Sq, 8 St, Prince St |
| 1, 9 | Christopher Street |
| 2, 3 | 14 Street |
| 4, 5 | 14 Street/Union Square |
| 6 | 23 St, 14 St/Union Sq, Astor Place |
| PATH | 9th St, 14th St, 23rd St |
24 Hour NYC Travel Information: 718-330-1234
YOU ARE INVITED TO BE IN NEW YORK'S HALLOWEEN PARADE
- Be Creative - Wear Your Costume ! Only costumed marchers are allowed in the Parade.
- Show Up on Sixth Ave bet. Spring & Broome Sts.
- Arrive between 6:30 and 8:30 or you might miss the Parade! The subway is the best way to get there, parking is always difficult and the Parade makes it even worse.
- Find your Friends, Good Music or A Group to March With
- Follow the Crowd Up Sixth Avenue (please do not go down Sixth Avenue, the police will stop you!)
Don't have a costume? ...then volunteer to carry a puppet!
HOW TO VOLUNTEER
Click Here to Volunteer
HALLOWEEN NYC PARADE FACT SHEET 2009
- The nation's largest public Halloween celebration
- Named as The Greatest Event on Earth by Festivals International for October 31
- Attended by over 2 million people, seen by over 1 million on TV
- The nation's only major night Parade
- Seen LIVE on NY 1 Television
- Listed as one of the 100 Things to do Before You Die
New York's 36th Annual Village Halloween Parade Theme 2009: Terra Incognita
"Hic dracones sunt"
Here be dragons.
The Lennox Globe in the New York Public Library was engraved with these words exactly 500 years ago, a warning to early European explorers of the perils that awaited them just beyond the horizon of the known world.
We might laugh today at the mingling of matter-of-fact and myth expressed in this simple inscription. Yet these days, as we confidently plot our course by GPS and Google Earth, Terra Incognita is nearer to us as it ever was. Our Northwest Passage assumes the full dimension of dread and promise that marked the voyages of Champlain and Hudson 400 years ago; except that now, in the immortal words of Peter Schuman, "We are all in the same boat." Together we sail into the uncharted waters of an economy in turmoil and a planet in catastrophic upheaval. At the same time, the winds of change blow us toward new virtual worlds, astounding discoveries, and global communities, bringing us closer to the new and the strange than we have ever been before.
The Village Halloween Parade has always been a place where the strange is commonplace and where bliss and dread intermingle. This year, we embark on our 36th Voyage, to Terra Incognita. We celebrate all those ancient Mariners who set their course before us into darkness and uncertainty. This year, Official Parade designers Superior Concept Monsters will turn 6th Avenue into a vast, churning azure sea, made of billowing silk tides animated by 20 volunteers. Above the waves will ride a flotilla of square-rigged sails, which will be illuminated by projections of ancient maps. Performers will "catch" fragmentary images out of thin air, giving physical form to the act of discovery. Merging the rich iconography of early nautical charts with 17th-century scenography, the procession will become a living map, a Baroque tableau of blowing zephyrs and rosetta compasses, engraved legends and half-imagined landscapes. As the waves move steadily up Sixth Avenue, their choreographed undulations will hide and reveal a host of creatures real and imagined, as even individual Parade masqueraders become swept up in the tide of wonders.
Terra Incognita is a liminal place, historically poised between the theological confidence of Medieval maps (which labeled Paradise and Hell on a neat geometric disk) and the geographical precision of Enlightenment cartographers, who had mastered the science of longitude and the art of the sextant. Only in the age of Exploration -- in the uncertain times of Hudson and Champlain, Cabral and Columbus -- did we discover for the first time just how little we knew, and how vast Terra Incognita truly was.
It was an age of fantasies with concrete coordinates, of dreams that could be located on a half-empty chart, and of maps that hid Dragons in eastern oceans. Terra Incognita reminds us that we have faced the unknown before, and the just beyond the Dragons, always lie possibilities.
Jeanne Fleming - Director
Alex Kahn - Master Puppeteer
15th ANNUAL COSTUME CONTEST HALLOWEEN NYC
but choose we must...
so, last year we chose Serra Hirsch, "The Claw" for first prize...
and Mario Roca, "The Stove" and the Lausch's for the Lego People as runner-ups.
This year could be yours to win !
So come out in style !
HALLOWEEN NYC COSTUME WORKSHOPS
Spend the day or the weekend out of the City and in our Puppet Barn...there is always a big pot of soup, some hot cider, tea, coffee and cookies to fill out a day of good company while learning techniques and actually constructing the puppets that will appear at the head of the Parade on Halloween night.
These workshops are free and open to the public, but spaces are limited, so you must pre-register by signing up to be a Volunteer. You must provide your own transporation and housing if you plan to stay the weekend.
VEHICLE GUIDLINES FOR HALLOWEEN NYC
Those limited spaces are usually given to the handful of sponsors who support the parade, as a thank-you for their support. And even those vehicles must meet strict rules about the size, sound systems, capacity, and contents of the vehicle; and require prior arrangement with the parade to get official permits.
Finally, sorry to say this, but because our first concern is for the safety and enjoyment of the general public, motorized vehicles that just 'show-up' at the parade will be kindly requested not to join the celebration.
Thanks for your understanding and, Happy Halloween!
2009 HALLOWEEN VILLAGE PARADE LINKS
Wufoo - Parade Volunteer Sign-Up
Wikipedia - New York's Village Halloween Parade
Halloween NYC Music
2009 HALLOWEEN PARTIES
Halloween Guide Halloween PartiesJoonBug Halloween Parties
The History of Halloween Tradition
Halloween is the one of the oldest holidays still celebrated today. Halloween is also one of the most popular holidays, second only to Christmas. Today, millions of people celebrate Halloween without knowing its origins and myths, but it you're like me, knowing a little of the history and facts that surround Halloween make it all the more fascinating.
Beyond costume parties and trick-or-treating, the origins of Halloween can be traced to the Celtic New Year. The Romans, the Christian Church and, ultimately, our commercialized society revised and reinvented this holiday, but inside the modern traditions traces of Halloween's ancient past still remain.
Halloween's origins lie in an ancient Celtic festival. The Celtic people were a loose collection of tribes that, in the distant past, lived across much of Europe. They never formed an empire in any sense of the word, but were rather highly independent collection of clans - which allowed more organized folks, like the Romans to eventually conqueor them.
On the night of October 31, the Celts of ancient Ireland celebrated Samhain (pronounced - sow-in) in England, the festival was called Calan Gaef (pronounced - kalan-geyf.) They celebrated their new year on November 1. The Celts believed that Samhain, the night before the new year, marked the end of summer, the harvest, and the beginning of the dark, cold winter, a time of year when the boundary between the worlds of the living and the dead became became thin, allowing spirits - both harmless and harmful - to pass through.
It is believed that the need to ward off harmful spirits led to the wearing of costumes and masks, typically consisting of animal heads and skins to disguise themselves and thus avoid harm. Since not all spirits were friendly, the Celts also left gifts and treats out to pacify the evil and ensure next years crops would be plentiful. This custom evolved into Halloween trick-or-treating.
The Celts thought that the presence of the otherworldly spirits made it easier to make predictions about the future. For a people entirely dependent on the volatile natural world, these prophecies were an important source of comfort and direction during the long, dark winter. Some of the ancient divinatory rituals have survived down to today in the form of games like "bobbing for apples." Apples were special fruit to the Celts. At the heart of the Celtic Otherworld grows an apple tree whose fruit has magical properties. Old sagas tell of heroes crossing the western sea to find this wondrous country. At Samhain, the apple harvest is in, and old hearthside games, such as apple-bobbing, called apple-dookin' in Scotland, reflect the journey across water to obtain the magic apple.
By A.D. 43, the Romans had conquered the majority of the Celtic lands. In the course of the four hundred years that they ruled the Celtic regions, two Roman festivals of Roman origin were combined with the traditional Celtic celebration of Samhain. The first was Feralia, a day in late October when the Romans traditionally commemorated the passing of the dead. The second was a day to honor Pomona, the Roman goddess of fruit and trees. The symbol of Pomona is the apple and the incorporation of this celebration into Samhain probably helped keep the tradition of "bobbing" for apples going. Eventually the influence of Christianity spread into the Celtic lands.
In the seventh century, Pope Boniface IV designated November 1 All Saints' Day, a time to honor saints and martyrs. It is widely believed today that the pope was attempting to replace the Celtic festival of the dead with a related, but church-sanctioned holiday. The celebration was also called All-hallows or All-hallowmas (from Middle English Alholowmesse meaning All Saints' Day) and the night before it, the night of Samhain, began to be called All-hallows Eve and, eventually, Halloween. Even though the church altered the holiday, it was celebrated similarly to Samhain, with big bonfires, parades, and dressing up in costumes as saints, angels, and devils. Together, the three celebrations, the eve of All Saints', All Saints', and All Souls', were called Hallowmas.
As European immigrants came to America, they brought their varied Halloween customs with them. Because of the rigid Protestant belief systems that characterized early New England, the celebration of Halloween in colonial times was extremely limited there. As the beliefs and customs of different European ethnic groups, as well as the American Indians, meshed, a distinctly American version of Halloween began to emerge. The first celebrations included "play parties," public events held to celebrate the harvest, where neighbors would share stories of the dead, tell each other's fortunes, dance, and sing. By the middle of the nineteenth century, annual autumn festivities were common, but Halloween was not yet celebrated everywhere in the country.In the second half of the nineteenth century, America was flooded with new immigrants. These new immigrants, particularly the millions of Irish fleeing Ireland's potato famine of 1846, helped to popularize the celebration of Halloween nationally. Taking from Irish and English traditions, Americans began to dress up in costumes and go house to house asking for food or money, a practice that eventually became today's "trick-or-treat" tradition. Young women believed that, on Halloween, they could divine the name or appearance of their future husband by doing tricks with yarn, apple parings, or mirrors. In the late 1800s, there was a move in America to mold Halloween into a holiday more about community and neighborly get-togethers, than about ghosts, pranks, and witchcraft.
At the turn of the century, Halloween parties for both children and adults became the most common way to celebrate the day. Parties focused on games, foods of the season, and festive costumes. Parents were encouraged by newspapers and community leaders to take anything "frightening" or "grotesque" out of Halloween celebrations. Because of their efforts, Halloween lost most of its superstitious and religious overtones by the beginning of the twentieth century.
By the 1920s and 1930s, Halloween had become a secular, but community-centered holiday, with parades and town-wide parties as the featured entertainment. Despite the best efforts of many schools and communities, vandalism began to plague Halloween celebrations in many communities during this time. By the 1950s, town leaders had successfully limited vandalism and Halloween had evolved into a holiday directed mainly at the young. Due to the high numbers of young children during the fifties baby boom, parties moved from town civic centers into the classroom or home, where they could be more easily accommodated. Between 1920 and 1950, the centuries-old practice of trick-or-treating was also revived. Trick-or-treating was a relatively inexpensive way for an entire community to share the Halloween celebration. In theory, families could also prevent tricks being played on them by providing the neighborhood children with small treats. A new American tradition was born, and it has continued to grow.
Today, Americans spend an estimated $6.9 billion annually on Halloween, making it the country's second largest commercial holiday. Of course, whether we're trick or treating, bobbing for apples, or dressing in costumes, each one of these Halloween traditions relies on the good will of the very same "spirits" whose presence the early Celts felt so keenly. Ours is not such a different holiday after all!