Halloween in Brooklyn, photographed over 50 years
Spirits and soul — Larry Racioppo’s new book documents half a century of the October festivities in New York, while tracing the city’s ever-changing character.
On Halloween 1974, Larry Racioppo finished work at a photography studio in New York City and headed straight home to his neighbourhood in Brooklyn. He set out to photograph the young revellers running riot on his block, and what happened next took him by surprise. “I walked out of my house, and when the kids saw my camera, they charged me,” he recalls. “I just started taking pictures, handheld, 35mm, no flash, and I photographed until it got too dark.”
What began as an impromptu shoot became a decades-long record of Halloween on the streets of Brooklyn. Racioppo returned year after year, documenting children in plastic masks, homemade costumes and streaks of face paint against the backdrop of a crumbling neighbourhood. Some wore little more than old sheets or whatever they could find at home, but still grinned and pulled faces for the camera, turning the block into their own playground. First published in 1980, Racioppo’s Halloween returns in a new expanded edition featuring 230 photographs, tracing five decades of a local tradition and a city transformed around it.
Growing up in a working-class Italian-American family in South Brooklyn, Racioppo’s experience of Halloween involved neighbourhood parties, pumpkin carving and bobbing for apples, alongside darker streaks of mischief. “My cousins and I were more into egg throwing and fighting than the costumes and trick or treating,” he says. “There was some meanness and some damage, but I’ve always found it to be a celebration.”
New York has a long history of giving children licence to misbehave. Before Halloween became the city’s main occasion for costumed mischief, children celebrated Ragamuffin Day on Thanksgiving, dressing in tattered clothes to roam the streets asking strangers for money. Those who refused could find themselves on the receiving end of a flour-filled sock. Ragamuffin Day had largely faded away by the 1940s, as its traditions of dressing up and begging for treats became associated with Halloween. Racioppo’s book captures that same unruly spirit, not least in his instructions for making a chalk sock: “You would take these big street chalks, put them in a sock and throw it under the wheels of a car, so it would crush it into a powder. Then you’d run around hitting each other with it.”
Over time, Racioppo became part of his neighbourhood’s ritual, known to the children as the “Picture Man”. He recalls one encounter in particular: “I was talking to some kids, and they put shaving cream all over my back,” he laughs. “They threatened to hit me with eggs, but I was nice to them, and they liked me.”
Racioppo’s photographs chart the evolution of his craft, from grainy black-and-white 35mm negatives to larger formats and colour, but they also chart a version of Brooklyn that has largely disappeared. He recalls photographing a Halloween party at the Park Slope Food Coop in the 1980s, when the community-run cooperative had only 50 members. Today, it boasts approximately 17,000 members and made headlines in May 2026 when members voted to boycott Israeli products. As the borough grew more fashionable, rising property prices and gentrification altered the streets and communities that had shaped Racioppo’s early work. “Brooklyn became so developed and so famous over the years, that it became cool to live there,” he says.
- Read next: In Photos: Halloween on New York’s subway
Despite these changes, Racioppo notices a surprising continuity in the way people celebrate Halloween. Costumes may come and go with the latest pop-culture craze, but familiar characters endure. “I’ve noticed the temporary costumes that come every few years. They’re often tied to blockbuster movies,” he notes. “At one point you saw all these Fonz kids, Jaws or Star Wars, and there’s always a vampire, there’s always a Wolfman.” Though Halloween has become increasingly commercial and adult-oriented, Racioppo isn’t convinced the spirit of the occasion has changed much. “I hate to sound dumb, but I don’t think it’s that different.” From his neighbour handing out sweets on her porch to Doris V. Amen’s annual Halloween party at her family-run funeral parlour, the celebrations continue to take many forms.
What has changed more noticeably is our relationship with the camera. Racioppo now photographs Halloween in Rockaway, Queens, where he lives. He finds people more cautious today, particularly when it comes to photographs circulating online. “Halloween now is more guarded. People are more aware of all the stuff on the internet, the things you can do with photographs.” Parents are also more likely to accompany their children, and Racioppo recognises that he is now less familiar to the people he photographs. “I’m more of a stranger. I’m not as well known as I used to be in my own neighbourhood.”
Still, he remains drawn to the unpredictability of street photography. “It’s so invigorating,” he says. “What you get back may be disappointing. You may really never get what you want, but the energy and the fun is actually in the photographing.” Racioppo’s photographs also capture immigrant families taking part in the festivities, which he sees as evidence of how shared traditions help people feel connected to a new home. “I think that such participation in patriotic rituals and festivals bind a person to their new country,” he says. “It happened to my Italian-American family over three generations.”
Across 50 years, Racioppo’s work documents how Halloween brings communities together and offers the freedom to become someone else entirely. While Brooklyn’s streets and the people who inhabit them continue to change, his images suggest that Halloween’s appeal has endured. As he puts it, “It’s a way to be something besides yourself, to be your fantasy.”
Halloween by Larry Racioppo is published by Castle Books.
Anna Stafford is the editorial assistant at Little White Lies.
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