"The Fun Is in Dressing up": The Greenwich Village Halloween Parade and the Reimagining of Urban Space

It was a representation of New York and what New Yorkers are familiar witha parody of what's good and bad about New York. The subway was the H line-the Hell line-with destinations instead of going from, like, Dyre Ave. we spelled it Dire Ave. Instead of going to Bedford Stuyvesant, we went to Deadford Stuyvesant. Slurs and slants on all the stuff. It was kind of cynical and we wanted to throw a kind of gruesome or grotesque thing in a very Halloween-type costume, as well as just this New York thing. One thing that worked out really well with it that we hadn't planned on was we had sliding doors on the costume, and, of course, the parade got held up many times, so the subway car would stop frequently; we'd slide open the doors and a lot of other people that were just in the parade in various other costumes kind of went in and rode the subway with us. It was mentioned on local news and I think on national news, not visual coverage, but they wrapped up their coverage by saying that the hit of the parade was a working subway complete with malfunctioning lights. . . . We even created the effect of sparking tracks with a flash bulb, and we had someone in there with a ghetto blaster. -Eric Mueller, graphic designer, August 1990