NYC’s best block party

0% exclusive = 100% fun

Jamie: 10 years ago I discovered the best block party in New York City. It was 7pm on Halloween, and for the first time in my life, I wasn’t planning to celebrate my favorite holiday. I wasn’t even dressed up.

I was two-years deep into what was supposed to be six-month search for an affordable, roommate-free apartment. I had been living with my mom the entire time, and I was desperate to get out. We both were.

Which is why the two of us ended up navigating a new neighborhood at night — amid trick-or-treaters and elaborately decorated brownstones — just to attend a strangely-scheduled open house for a particularly promising studio apartment in Clinton Hill.

The minute I saw the apartment, I fell in love. I knew it had to be mine. So like any savvy New Yorker, I stood in the empty living room for the entire duration of the open house, nervously eyeing the door for someone who might come swipe it away from me with a better offer.

But they never did. They were having too much fun outside. 

Part of the reason I wanted to move to this neighborhood was because Rachel already lived there, so after two hours of chatting up the despondent broker (he realized too late that he’d made a grave (hehe) error in scheduling an open house on Halloween), we left to find her and her family at their favorite event of the night: Pam Fleming’s Dead Zombie Band. 

Perhaps it was divine timing, or a Halloween miracle, but I credit this free community event as one of the main reasons I landed my dream apartment.

Rachel: When our kids were little, trick-or-treating always ended on Waverly Avenue where Pam Fleming’s Dead Zombie Band shuts down the entire block so they can perform jazzy renditions of Halloween classics like Monster Mash.

For years, it was the perfect place to hand our kids the house keys and tell them to walk the half block back home while we stayed to party. Now, we just make a beeline straight there.

Even in a neighborhood where people go all-out for Halloween, this concert has always been our highlight. It’s the closest thing you’ll find to New Orleans in New York City — a quiet street where you can sip out of a flask, swing to a brass band, bump into neighbors, and crack up trying to identify everyone behind the extremely creative costumes.

Throughout my 27 years in NYC, I can’t think of a single experience for which I’ve paid money that has rivaled the sort of free, community events that creative people bring to life simply for the sake of the party … profit be damned.

Take for example, Critical Mass — the radical bike ride that has been shutting down city streets for hundreds of cyclists since 1987. I can still remember the first time I rode my bike through the (car-free) Park Avenue Viaduct at night thinking — this is the most free I will ever feel!

Decades before Chanel, Glossier and Rivian moved into Williamsburg, my friends and I would play stickball in the streets off Kent avenue. We gathered for a weekly, un-permitted kickball game on the McCarren Park blacktop. The first time we ever saw the band Future Islands (for whom we would later make music videos) they were playing under the JMZ overpass on a summer night. 

J+R: But lately it feels like we’ve been starved of this sort of fun. Maybe that explains the unhinged media attention surrounding the Timothee Chalamet Lookalike Contest.

Of course everyone’s obsession with the Timmys reveals our collective need for non-election news, maybe our collective desire for a twinky boyfriend, but most of all it reveals our collective hunger for artful, silly, lawless spontaneity.

Organized by YouTuber Anthony Potero, the contest went from being a funny joke on Twitter to IRL legend. Apparently there were thousands in attendance, including its waifish namesake in the flesh.

And what’s more notable than the crowd itself was the fact that Potero and friends pulled it off by posting old fashioned flyers throughout the city. He didn’t get corporate sponsorship or famous people to promote it. He just planned a frivolous stunt that captured the attention of the greatest city in America for the sake of doing something fun (and promotion for his Youtube page, whatever).

My favorite detail? He got a $500 fine for hosting the event without a permit. Not because he got a fine, although it makes a good story, but because he didn’t get a permit. Permits schmermits!

This sort of permit-less fun has a lot of people’s undies in a bunch — like our mayor (for now) Eric Adams. Because this stuff doesn’t make anyone money.

Just this week, Gothamist reported that  “New York City is planning to reject applications for new street festivals in an effort to cut down on NYPD overtime.”

Oh! And they’ve started cracking down on public drinking — a completely benign activity that was normalized during the pandemic to no deleterious effect, but just so happens to be an easy way to increase revenue at the public’s expense.

Which brings us back to Halloween — the holiday that stands for everything we love about community, creativity, whimsy and freedom. Let’s use this night as a reminder that we should get weird in the streets with each other, crack a beer, sing a song, give things away instead of making them exclusive, expensive and boring.

Let’s keep breaking the rules in the name of good fun.

See you on Waverly Ave!

XOXO,

J+R