With bravura Halloween displays, pumpkins get their 15 minutes of fame
Forget jack-o’-lanterns and even the “Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown.” With Halloween on the horizon, pumpkins have become objects of spectacle, showmanship and competition, as displays across the New York region strive to be bigger, better and more bravura in their use of the no-longer-humble member of the gourd family.
The New York Botanical Garden has an 1,872-pound pumpkin that provided the raw materials for a tableau depicting a zombie apocalypse. Ripley’s Believe It or Not in Times Square trucked in a similarly humongous specimen (1,417 pounds) for its master carver. And competing pumpkin displays in Westchester County and on Long Island both claim about 5,000 blazing orbs.
Historic Hudson Valley, a nonprofit group, begins planning a year ahead for its Great Jack-O’-Lantern Blaze, now in its eighth year at Van Cortlandt Manor, an 18th-century farmstead in Croton-on-Hudson, N.Y.
Among the new attractions this season: a 12-foottall grandfather clock, with moving pumpkin parts and a menagerie with a life-size giraffe and elephant.
“We’ve outdone ourselves,” said Michael Natiello, the creative director of the Blaze. “For the first time, we’re experimenting with movement.”
About half of the 5,000 pumpkins on display are made of foam and thus can be stored for reuse next year. But the rest are fresh — as in, they will rot — so to keep the display going for six weeks, Historic Hudson Valley orders about 10,000 pumpkins. Teams of scoopers and carvers form an assembly line at the start of each week, and Girl Scouts arrive nightly to light the many candles.
For the New York Botanical Garden, the pumpkin carving and exhibit, which began three years ago, has meant more visitors at a time of year when attendance usually waned.
“It’s a whole different audience than we usually see at the garden so it’s fantastic,” said Karen Daubmann, the garden’s director of exhibitions and seasonal displays.
An upstart this season is Rise of the Jack-O’-Lanterns at the Old Westbury Gardens on Long Island. Like the display in Westchester, it features a mix of 5,000 real and fake pumpkins.
Pollock said he and his team had contacted Historic Hudson Valley in the hope of working together, but the group had demurred. He rejected suggestions that Rise of the Jack-O’-Lanterns had merely copied Westchester’s formula, saying that his exhibit, unlike the Blaze, had no large-scale sculptures like dinosaurs and included references to pop culture.
“I imagine they’re not happy,” he conceded, referring to Historic Hudson Valley. “But it’s far enough away.”