When Hoboken’s residents get tired of fighting for empty seats on the PATH train and promotions at work, they come home and relax by trying to top their neighbors with the earliest and most outlandish Halloween decorations.
This phenomenon is most visible the upper reaches of Park, Bloomfield, and Garden streets, where by the beginning of October, spiders and ghosts already adorned the staircases of upscale rowhouses.
In front of his home at 820 Bloomfield St., Jeff Goldstein and his son Javen have curated a collection of the grossest things in life; a rotting torso, spiders, severed limbs, evil clowns, and a bloody heart. Jeff says when he started putting up decorations years ago, he was the only one on his block. Now his neighbors, including a luxury condo complex built inside a converted church, have joined in the fun.
Says Jeff, “They’re trying to top us.”
When applying cobwebs, many Hoboken homeowners seem to have taken to heart the aphorism, sometimes attributed to Stalin, that quantity has a quality all its own. But a select few residents elevate their decorations to the level of art, or at the very least, whimsy.
At the corner of 11th and Garden streets, spiral-eyed dervishes hang in a web of the “world wide” variety, cellphones in their gloved hand. A helpful sign explains that they are the centerpiece of “Cloud Zombies- Consumed,” an art exhibit “about how technology and the Internet, though great tools to connect us, can also disconnect us from the space and place we are in and those around us.”
What better way to pull us away from our devices than a pile of pumpkins and orange lights on every stoop, and a Scream mask in every window?
Our Digital Archive from 2000 – 2016
