Residents go all-in on Halloween decorations
Nanci Gonzalez wants you to drive by her house, gawk, gasp and gag. She wants you to slow your car and take a longer look. Even better, shewants you to park and get out and stand in front of her yard and simply
Take your time. She spent most of the spring and all of summer preparing her Halloween display. She lost her job at the Original Mr. Beef in April. The very next day, to stave off the sadness, to keep busy, she went into her garage and began building, and building, and building. Using polystyrene foam, she built amausoleum. Over the arch, she carved “Talbot,” for Larry Talbot, the American who returned to his ancestral Wales only to be bitten by a wolf. He became theWolfMan of the 1941 Universal classic. He emerges now snarling from amakeshift crypt on the 300 block of Edinburgh Drive in Lockport, a monster-size animatronic lycanthrope.
He was a splurge; he cost a couple of hundred dollars.
But most of everything else on her lawn, Gonzalez either had or made: The bars fitted over her windows, the ivy that slinks through those bars, the bubbling cauldron, the crumbling tomb stones. When it bugged her that her ordinary ranch home made for a mundane moors, she wrapped the front of the house in a gray plastic scrim. And when her husband wonderedwhere theywould store all this stuff she was building, she told him she’d find a place, then went back to building.
“There is so much involved to create just the impression of something scary,” she toldme.
What’s there now, on her lawn, throughHalloween, is a temporary art installation.
What’s there is personal expression, full of thought and craft, cryptic detailing and a hefty populist attitude towards subject. One of her ghouls even wears Gonzalez’s wedding dress. She tried to dye it black for the
A home on 101st Street in Oak Lawn is barely visible behind Halloween decorations. display; when it came out his wall of skulls. His giant There are somany skeletons closer to an eerie light purspider? Oh, HomeDepot, he on Illinois lawns at the ple, sheworked with it. said with a slight wince, and moment— asopposedto the Walk your neighborhood. with reason: Behind him ones inside our closets— my This is the Golden Age of stood a full-scale recreation four-year-old chirped from Halloween Lawns. of a sewer for the backseat the other day
You would call it holiday the murderous Pennywise that she sawawomansitting decorating. of “It.” inside the trunk of her car. But really, it’s sculpture. Drive around, you’ll see: Another Halloween skeleThank your local hardAs with any medium, there ton, I assumed — or rather, ware store, thank tutorials is a redundancy to Hallowlater, I hoped. Not far from on YouTube, thank the een lawns. Schiffer’shome, onthe4500 popularity of crafting, thank A lot of that sameness is a block of Fairview Avenue in the pandemic for freeing up byproduct of hardware Downers Grove, there’s a our spare time and Hallowstores and the ubiquity of remarkable display titled “A een itself for offering a fresh shops like Spirit Halloween, Pirate’s Life For Me,” the channel of invention to anyeach selling $100-plus aniwork of the Wood family one with a rudimentary matronics. But then, like any who lives there. Using knowledge of electronics. medium, there are materials planks of fencing, theymade Thank DIY guilds like the and there is what is made half of a pirate ship, and they Chicago Haunt Builders for with those materials. Outmanned it with more than sharing knowledge and enside his home on the 4100 two dozen pirate skeletons, couraging their members block of Williams Street in who are stepping lively, (Gonzalez herself is one). Downers Grove, James avoiding the kraken tentaWhat’s sitting on ChicagoSchiffer has — he took a cles that curl out of the lawn. area front lawnsright nowis long, calculating look — The whole thing is then a kind of middle-class folk around $60,000 in animacapped with a shimmery art, one that makes the most tronics and other props on blue light to approximate of the only blank canvas that display, froma three-headed the steady roll ofwaves. a lot of suburbanites already dog belching smoke to a The most soughtHallowown: their lawns. knife-wielding tike on a een lawn decor this year is a
Again and again, the creabike. But what makes it 12-foot skeleton that was tors of some of the best more than just putting monsold by Home Depot, lawns out there note an item ey on the screen, so to speak, though now largely sold out or two they purchased from is the circus tent he built to fromcoast to coast, apropso Home Depot or Menards, tie it together, blotting out overused it reads in many but always with a sheepish his home and replacing it home displays more like a apology, as if they were with a freak show. status symbol. (It costs $299 letting you down somehow. The building block of and looks like it.) I came An Oak Lawn man smoked most Halloween lawns, across only one house that in the street before his small though, is simpler: The knew how to make such as home on the 5100 block of humble skeleton, variously ostentatious prop work: 101st Street, pleased with posed and decomposed, That’s the Carol Stream the neighborhood traffic, straddling mailboxes and house of Jim and Dawn the ebb and flow in front of garages and lampposts. Slanker, on the 300 block of
Canyon Trail. They have two 12-footers, one lurking in the back, another draped with torn sheets and topped with a pumpkin head.
Their display, a masterpiece, totally worth the trip, is so clever, fun and rich in surprises like that, you barely notice the towering skeletons at first. Actually, you don’t even notice their house. It’s really two displays broken up by their driveway, held together by the sidewalk that runs through. There doesn’t seem to be a theme but rather a steady reminder of Halloween classics. A ghost with red possum eyes glides slowly inside a crypt. Skeletons rest half-buried in the lawn, their heads beside them. Pumpkin- headed children dance in a circle, and when a casket rattles violently, lean in close and there’s a clip from Monty Python: “I’m not dead yet!” A third huge skeleton sits heavily and unmovable, until it stands, rising to 12 feet itself. Their best effect is not even intentional: Nearly everything in the gruesome garden wiggles, jumps or lurches, often with the hiss of a piston or clank of metal, only to reset, sweetly reminiscent of the haunted rides in old amusement parks. It’s charming, I told Jim. “It’s supposed to be spooky,” he mumbled.
Lawn-peep long enough and you’ll see: There’s a lot of gore out there. But the bloodier lawns also come across as some of the lazier lawns, and the most thoughtlessly crowded. I saw a house in Schaumburg with heads on pikes and a medical table strewn with severed body parts; I passed one in Oak Forest that, along with mannequins of Freddy Krueger and MichaelMyers and other fictional killers, had a John Wayne Gacy headstone. I wondered if it gets the kind of ewww the homeowners intended.
For the record, should youheadout to admirewhat your neighbors have created, the best local Halloween lawn peeping this year — that is, themost decorated homes clustered within a short distance of each other — is around Schaumburg and Oak Lawn. (The Chicago Haunt Builders website is a good place to plan a trip.) Make no mistake, though a handful of Chicago neighborhoods are no slouches when it comes to decorating— Andersonville, Chatham, Edgebrook, Gold Coast — this is a suburban art, dictated by wide lawns and home ownership.
It’s also somewhat driven by taste, class and the personality of a place. In the working-class enclaves of the south suburbs, there’s a congenial, welcoming festival atmosphere in front of some homes; its owners clearly want anyone and everyone to stop and chat. On theNorth Shore, however, not only are full-blown displays rare, they’re modest.
Darkness serves a Halloween lawn.
Trees do, too. And a neighbor’s empty driveway. A dead end. A cul-de-sac. A stalk of long grass waving in an October wind. A pair of simple green eyes hung perfectly inside an attic window. There’s a home in La Grange Park with a single plastic pumpkin grinning on a large dark lawn, and I stopped here to admire it for far longer than I did at those homes dressed to resemble bloodbaths.
Again, it’s sculpture, or at least a kind of environmental performance art.
Either way, Halloween after Halloween, lawn after lawn, zombie after zombie, it’s a practice that’s getting increasingly interesting. “I don’t know if it’s actually an art yet but it is valuable. We all need an escape right now,” Gonzalez of Lockport said. “I don’t judge someone’s display. Even the most crowded ones, the ones that just throweverything on the front lawn — even those people are sharing a love of Halloween. Kudos to them. But have you seen the 12foot skeletons?”