Manhattan Upper East Side Halloween

Philip Falcone Halloween Decorations Manhattan Upper East Side

Last Halloween, the horror adorning the facade of the $49 million Upper East Side townhouse owned by the hedge fund billionaire Philip Falcone and his wife, Lisa Maria, was an aged crone cradling a dead baby. Inside a black hearse parked by the curb on East 67th Street, the Grim Reaper beheaded a corpse.

The crone is gone this year, perhaps in a nod to neighbors’ protests about a display that included a smoke-breathing gargoyle and a little girl at play on a swing marked “Cemetery.”

Philip Falcone Upper East Side Manhattan Halloween Decorations

But the hearse is back and the protests all but forgotten, as hedge funders in greater numbers join the competition to outspook other one-tenth of 1 percenters — or else prove once and for all that Manhattan is the new suburbs.

Two-Headed Halloween Princess attended by an army of rats, Manhattan Halloween, Upper East Side

On side streets throughout Manhattan’s most expensive ZIP codes, townhouses are bedecked from cornice to stoop with the gruesome trappings of a secularized (and wildly commercialized) modern version of an ancient Celtic harvest festival.

Ghost of the Great Crash Halloween Hedge Fund Territory Manhattan Upper East Side

There are goblins, crones, witches, zombies, skeletons, ghouls, ghosts and bats and — for the last few years outside the East 74th Street house owned by Marc Lasry, a co-founder of Avenue Capital — bloodied life-size dummies hung from a balcony.

Hearse and ghoul on a swing, Halloween at Falcone Mansion, once the home of the Penthouse Magazine founder Bob Guccione, Manhattan, Upper East Side

Currently poised by the chaste neo-Classical style door to one multimillion-dollar East 67th Street house just down the block from the Falcones stands an effigy of a spooky two-headed girl with an army of rats swarming at her feet. Feel free to choose your own metaphor.

The Addams Family Manhattan Halloween just off Fifth Avenue, opposite the artist Jeff Koons
Gantlet of Horrors Manhattan Upper East Side
Ghosts, goblins, hags, crones, witches, ghouls, werewolves and zombies Upper East Side Manhattan Halloween display
Manhattan Halloween:  Caution tape, "Keep Out," and "Cemetery" signs, tattered curtains and fake spider webbing Upper East Side 2015
Manhattan Halloween "American Horror Story:  Hotel"
Manhattan Halloween townhouse on East 92nd Street once owned by Woody Allen covered in caution tape for Halloween 2015
Manhattan Halloween Upper East Side 2015
Manhattan Halloween:  Bittersweet, ravens and snakes in a basked of poisoned apples Carnegie Hill
Manhattan Halloween 2015 Favorite Decorations

Text by Guy Trebay, The New York Times, October 28, 2015

Photos: Christian Hansen for The New York Times

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