TGIF!

It’s Halloween weekend and we can’t help but feel like we sure are sitting pretty. This weekend is when it feels good to be in your own ‘hood. Not to brag, but we’re pretty happy to have not one, not two, but seven neighborhoods to enjoy this weekend. You didn’t know Grand St. Settlement is in the Lower East Side, the East Village, East New York, Brownsville, Williamsburg, Bushwick, and Bedford-Stuyvesant? Yep – we’ve grown a lot this past year!

This Week’s Inspiration

Our favorite story this week is neither spooky nor scary. Last Saturday, our Bushwick-Hylan Community Center partnered with the Bushwick Tenant’s Association for a Halloween Costume Drive. About 300 participants and community members received costumes thanks to the Brooklyn Nets.

Our small ones had an Imagination Day parade to get in the Halloween spirit. Early Head Start classes went from door-to-office-door at 80 Pitt Street and received plenty of stickers (as to whether they counted as tricks or treats, we couldn’t get a clear consensus). Downstairs, youth programs from five different afterschool sites in Manhattan got together for a Haunted House and gory science. Check out the slime!

Halloween Happenings: a few picks for your Saturday

See what’s happening in NYC Parks, which scary movies the city is raising from the dead (more here), and some neighborhood picks below!

Lower East Side & East Village

Neighborhood kids can trick-or-treat at various locations in the neighborhood, including Economy Candy at 108 Rivington St., which is set to continue its annual Halloween tradition of handing out candy outside its store from noon to 2 to 5:30 p.m on Saturday

Celebrate the Day of the Dead with cultural nonprofit Mano a Mano: Mexican Culture without Borders. This free festival featuring arts activities, cultural presentations, live music and a marketplace featuring traditional crafts and foods at the East Yard of St. Marks Church-In-The-Bowery, 131 E. 10th St.

La Plaza Cultural Community Garden, at East 9th Street and Avenue C, is hosting two events for children. From 4 to 5 p.m., kids can hear scary stories from the garden’s resident “witch” in the gazebo. Immediately afterwards, the garden will host a “Ghostbusters” party with a haunted maze, fortune-teller, themed “Laboratory of Horror” and garden members dressed up as the ghost-catchers.

Williamsburg & Bushwick

Brooklyn Bowl is hosting a FREE “spooktacular dance party” party for families with kids. From 11:00 AM until 3:00 PM you can get your groove and face painting on.

Art Alert! The Central Library  at 10 Grand Army Plaza, Prospect Heights is hosting a FREE printmaking workshop for adults and teens. From 12:00 PM until 3:00 PM you can learn how to create an image on a linoleum block and then print using a multi-media printing press. You’ll learn something new about witchcraft.

Bed-Stuy

If you’re looking to trick-or-treat, follow the orange and black balloons around Bed-Stuy. The annual event is hosted by the Jefferson Avenue TNT Block Association, with organizers mapping out participating neighborhood blocks. Pick up a map of this year’s houses and blocks at the 99 cents store at 1445 Fulton St. and Foodtown at 1420 Fulton St. and check out the route here.

The Brooklyn Children’s Museum’s Monster Mash promises to be a fun-filled daylong celebration with live music, art workshops and science stations for costumed kids. Tickets are $11, BCM members get in for free.

Don’t miss the Halloween Festival at Herbert Von King Park, corner of Greene and Marcy avenues. Starting at noon, the Von King Park Conservancy hosts a Halloween Festival in partnership with the 79th Precinct, with a pumpkin patch and haunted house in this neighborhood green space. THe party stops at three, but kids can continue the festivities with a party inside the Magnolia Tree Earth Center at 677 Lafayette Ave.