Saturday Night in Greenpoint: Hallowolfbat featuring Flipper with David Yow at the House of Vans

(Videos courtesy Matthew Ahern) (Video courtesy beatlevana5)
(Video courtesy Stefan Sonic)

Thursday Night in Williamsburg: Halloween with Alan Howarth and Liturgy at 285 Kent

(Videos courtesy UnARTigNYC)

Sunday Evening on the Lower East Side: Celebrate Almost Halloween with Castle Black at The Delancey

(Videos courtesy Castle Black Music)

Early Saturday Afternoon in the East Village: The 23rd Annual Tompkins Square Halloween Dog Parade in Tompkins Square Park

(Video courtesy jay r Mojica)

Early Friday Evening in Williamsburg: Harvest Festival at P.S. 132 The Conselyea School

With Halloween just around the corner, we walked down Conselyea Street to the corner of Manhattan Avenue for the annual P.S. 132 Harvest Festival.

Our wonderful neighborhood elementary school featured festive decor, good food, lots of activities, costumed children (and parents), and lots of fun among the boos and ghouls.

Pumpkins and ghosts were a major motif.

There was face painting, of course, for those Williamsburg kids too young to get tattoos.

We patiently waited on line to get in to the school.

A skeleton greeted us as we walked in the building. (That used to happen to us every day at P.S. 203 back in the 1950s!)

We saw spiders but not Spidey.

And we saw lots of people, young and not so young, enjoying themselves on this very chilly late October evening -- with possible snow (yikes!) tomorrow.

You could get as many $1 tickets as you wanted, good for admission, food,

various activities, and the haunted house on the third floor, which we were too scared to visit.

Although we had to leave early to have dinner with some neighbors,

we're very grateful we got to attend this evening's Harvest Festival at P.S. 132.

Thanks to everyone who must have worked really hard to make it a success.

Sunday Afternoon in Williamsburg: Williamsburg Witches' Walk Halloween Parade on North Sixth Street

We walked over to Bedford Avenue and then on North 6th Street late this blustery afternoon for the Williamsburg Witches' Walk Halloween Parade, where we saw lots of cute costumed kids.

Sunday Afternoon in East Flatbush: Halloween Harvest at the Wyckoff Farmhouse Museum

We were back in the old neighborhood this afternoon at one of the oldest houses in the United States for the Halloween Harvest in Old Brooklyn festival at the Wyckoff Farmhouse Museum, which we grew up knowing as the Pieter Claesen Wyckoff House, a dilapidated place where the roof with a TV antenna was caving in and some old lady recluse lived.

Through hard work over the decades, the farmhouse has now been restored to some of its colonial glory.

We took the L train from Williamsburg to Rockaway Parkway, the B6 bus down Flatlands Avenue to Ralph Avenue, and then the B47, the Ralph Avenue bus we took every schoolday from September 1962 to June 1965 from the wooded triangle by Avenue T to Meyer Levin Junior High School 285 on Beverly Road. Today we got off a block earlier, at Clarendon Road, right in front of a deli that was the deli where we and our friends Eugene, Arnie, Billy, Jerry and Steve -- the Sultans -- used to get these delicious roast beef heroes with tomato slices and mustard. We walked across the street to M. Fidler Wyckoff House Park and paid our $8 admission.


In front of the house, John Carlin and the Kids Music Underground were performing some of their cool catchy songs.





There was apple cider pressing, apple dipping, face painting, treat-bag making, popcorn popping in an open-air hearth, pumpkin picking and decorating, and a spooky house tour for the kids.





We took the 2 p.m. tour of the house with a knowledgeable docent who told its fascinating history since 1652. Only a small part of the seventeenth-century house survives, the one room where Pieter Claesen Wyckoff and his wife raised their eleven children.







Out back there was a really nice peaceful spot.



With our hectic fall schedule, we haven't had much time to do anything but work. But ever since we returned to live in Brooklyn a few years ago, we've been wanting to see the Wyckoff Farmhouse Museum. Forty years ago, in 1970, Helen Berman, the mom of our friends Rona and Sandy, was on the local community board that was trying to do something about the historic property, and when we left New York to move to Florida ten years later, not much had been accomplished. Luckily things happened soon after that, and we were thrilled to see the beauty and fun of the place today.