New York’s Best-Dressed Halloween Stoops in New York City Are Spooky, Kooky, Autumnal Delights

The skeletons are out of the closet; the cobwebs unspooled. The pumpkins are carved, and the candy bars await. Each year, come October, cities and towns across America transform into Halloween wonderlands. And while suburban or rural locales might offer the luxury of space—a sprawling front yard for your 12-foot skeletons to roam free, for instance—in New York City, the limitations of scale just mean people have to get creative. Enter: the art of Halloween stoop decor.

Gone are the days of the simple jack-o’-lantern. These days, the city’s stoops are dressed to the nines. From giant pumpkins to elaborate tableaux, the displays have taken on a life of their own, as locals and visitors crawl the city for the spookiest steps.

In Park Slope, for example, the whispers start even before the first leaf turns. There’s a message on the wind (and on the neighborhood subreddit): Where is the big pumpkin? Will it return?

All of this excitement surrounds a 1,000-pound—give or take—pumpkin that graces the stoop of a brownstone in the Brooklyn neighborhood each year. It’s achieved such fame that someone added the residence to Google Maps as the “Big Pumpkin House.” The man behind the pumpkin is Charlie Pigott, a fourth-generation Park Slope resident and local real estate broker (and yes, he’s heard all the Charlie Brown Great Pumpkin jokes before).

“Halloween has always been a festive holiday for us, but the pumpkin didn’t come to our lives until about 10 years ago,” Pigott tells Vogue. It turns out the spectacular squash started as a bit of a fluke. Pigott was driving home from his daughter’s boarding school in Connecticut when he saw a huge pumpkin on the side of the road; he estimates it weighed about 150 pounds. He thought: Why not get it for the stoop? So he did.

Then, a few years later, his son, George, ordered pumpkins in Pennsylvania. Upon arriving at the farm, he discovered they had cracked. But there was an alternative. He sent Pigott a picture of what he called a “really, really big pumpkin,” but there was nothing for scale in the photo. “I said, ‘Bring it to Brooklyn,’” Pigott recalls. It turned out to be roughly 800 or 900 pounds.

When Pigott opened up the back of the U-Haul truck, he was flabbergasted. “I was like, oh my God, look at this thing!” he recalls. They got about 10 people from the neighborhood together and hoisted it onto the stoop. “Everybody really, really loved it,” he says. “And after we went big, there was no going back.”

Every year, Pigott and his son start thinking about the pumpkin in August, scouting farms in Connecticut, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Upstate New York. Their criteria: a tall pumpkin with good color, classic pumpkiny shape, and a solid stem. (“It’s very important to me to have a nice stem,” he says.) This year, the role went to a nearly thousand-pound pick from Honesdale, Pennsylvania, which Pigott got onto the stoop with a forklift.

“It’s very minimalist,” Pigott says of his overall stoop decor. “And what’s great about the pumpkin is: Who could dislike the pumpkin?” He adds that it’s “more of a harvest, fall, autumn Thanksgiving kind of approach than a Halloween approach.” He keeps it up until right after Thanksgiving.

Over the years, Pigott’s pumpkin has become a genuine neighborhood attraction, with all kinds of people coming by to take its picture. For Pigott, the tradition is all about gratitude. “It’s about giving back to the community that’s given so much to me,” he says. “I just want to bring joy to my neighborhood that’s reared me, reared my kids, reared my parents, and now my grandchildren.”

Across the city, other locals, such as Stoop and the City, have similarly turned their stoops into attractions that interpret cultural moments, building a viral presence online and in real life. Among the themes of this year’s many stoops are the Knicks’ championship win; a skeleton wedding; neon pink spiders; and “The American Musuem of Stuff” (featuring Ozempic and ranch dressing).

Some people hire designers, like the landscape design company Manscapers, to decorate their stoops. Co-founder Garrett McGee tells Vogue that the firm has worked on a lot of New York stoop decor set-ups since 2019. This year, for a client on West 76th Street, the team “wanted the stoop to feel as though a lush fall garden had grown around the entrance,” he says. To achieve this, they focused on a color palette of oranges, yellows, and reds, and used flowering plants such as chrysanthemums, marigolds, and black-eyed Susans, plus ornamental grasses and hibiscus.

For Hillary Wallace on the Upper West Side, the impulse to decorate her stoop around holidays and news moments comes out of her background in interiors; a Ralph Lauren alum, she ran her own design firm, Simon Wallace, before retiring a few years ago. “When we bought this townhouse about 11-plus years ago, I always put something out on it, because I kind of felt like if you have a stoop, you’ve got to do something,” she says.

This year, she went for a Gothic mansion motif inspired by the film Crimson Peak. Wallace gets her pumpkins—including black pumpkins and ones with faces made by growing the pumpkins in molds—from an auction in Pennsylvania. Thanks to her Instagram presence, Wallace reports that her stoop has drawn long lines of people from all over the world.

“It’s just grown and grown, and gotten more and more out of control because I’m a little out of control,” she says. “I like it because it’s a zone for everybody to come celebrate.”

What’s behind the golden (or orange) age of Halloween stoop decor in the city? Wallace feels it intensified after COVID. Her favorite part of decorating the stoop, aside from the opportunity to be creative, is that it brings the neighborhood together. “It makes everyone happy,” she says.

And what’s the trick-or-treating situation? “Last year, we probably had between 1,000 and 1,500 kids—easily. So this year I’m a little scared,” she says. “But in a good way.”