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Patterson Park

Eastern Avenue

October 27, 2012

15. Illuminati

Under a hazy, pre-Super Storm Sandy moon, thousands of costumed kids and families fill Patterson Park for a Saturday night parade like none other in the city. As the Raya Brass Band, of Brooklyn, New York, warms up their accordions, tubas, saxophones, and bass drums, a black hearse with a dead-eyed, tuxedoed driver, various ghosts and goblins, and later, a half-dozen giant white mice on stilts arrive in line behind the band.

Following an afternoon of hayrides, live music, art installations, chili, BBQ, funnel cake, and lantern-making workshops, the 12th annual Halloween Lantern Parade begins its park march to big cheers. Several dogs with neon, glowing collars jump into the mix along the way, pulling their owners in with them.

“I love it,” says Matthew Fass, Raya Brass Band accordionist, and coincidentally, music director for the annual New York Village Halloween Parade. “The New York parade started just like this, 39 years ago, as a small neighborhood parade in the West Village and just kept growing. This has the same community-building spirit.”

As the procession stretches forward in the dark, lanterns constructed from decorated plastic bottles and the occasional street lamp illuminate the parade’s underworld characters as well as the wild dancing and drumming of the Baltimore Rockers and Baltimore All-Stars Marching Bands. “I moved to the city two years ago,” says one of the young women, dressed, with 15 college friends, in red, white and blue Harlem Globetrotters jerseys, shorts, and headbands. “To me, Patterson Park is like the epicenter of all the good things that are going in Baltimore.”

After the parade, in front of the Pulaski Monument park entrance, acrobatic, flaming-baton twirlers entertain the departing crowds. Most people on hand don’t look anxious to leave.

When someone in their audience asks the name of the troupe that the flaming baton-twirlers belong to, one of the male twirlers shakes his head: “Oh, were not in an organized group or anything,” he explains. “Just a bunch of friends who got together for fun.”