No Halloween party again
Athens cites ongoing pandemic as reason for cancellation
For the second year in a row, Athens has canceled its famous Halloween party due to the coronavirus, city officials announced this week.
The annual tradition for Ohio University students was canceled in 2020 for the same reason.
The city on Monday cited the ongoing pandemic, coupled with concerns of the highly transmissible delta variant and increasing numbers of active cases in Athens County, as reasons that the citysanctioned Halloween Block Party would not take place in the popular Uptown bar-and-restaurant district later in October.
“We were hopeful this year it would be something that could occur,” said Andrew Stone, service-safety director for the city of Athens. “But it was not in the cards given the rise of the delta variant in the pandemic.”
Health officials had advised the city that Athens County might see a peak in cases mid-october, and Stone said they did not want to do anything to possibly add to that.
“If you’ve ever been to it, it’s just such a massive gathering, and you see how close people are to each other,” he said.
Streets will remain open and no activities, bandstands or vendors will be scheduled for the party that was supposed to happen on the weekend of Oct. 30.
Tens of thousands of costumed attendees, many of whom aren’t students of the nearby university, descend upon the area for the annual event, which first took place in 1974.
Back then, it was seen as more of a raucous takeover of Uptown Athens, but more recently the event has been embraced by the city as it has sanctioned and helped plan the party.
Crowd size and arrests have gone down in recent years with Athens and OU police arresting a combined 21 people in 2018, which pales in comparison to the more than 100 arrests made during the event in 2009.
Stone said people, for the most part, stayed home and quiet in the area for the Halloween weekend in 2020 as that
was still a time during the pandemic when many people weren’t out and about. This year, however, he said students are back on campus fully and the community is “more vibrant and functional and closer to being back to normal,” so the city is staffing law enforcement accordingly for the nights surrounding Halloween.
He said the city is looking forward to reinstituting the event in 2022 and maybe even reimagining some aspects of it.
“We want to create an environment that’s even better for everyone,” Stone said. “Maybe it will be more of a multigenerational-type of event.” award@dispatch.com @Allisonaward