Garden Place in Brooklyn Heights

“This is not the real road,” says a woman pushing a stroller on her phone. “The real street is crazy!” tea current route is Garden Place, a one-block stretch in Brooklyn Heights where thousands of children descend every Halloween to collect candy from $10 million townhomes made to look like a mummy’s tomb. By 4:30 pm, it is already crowded with wizards, fairies and more than a few miniatures. kens.

“It’s just getting started,” says Barbara Zimmerman, who has been handing out candy on the block for 36 years. (His perennial outfit, he tells me, is “The Laureate.”) She goes to Costco to prepare and estimates she has about 3,000 Twix bars and bags of Skittles to give away this year. That’s part of the reputation: No dusty Smarties, just premium candies. The neighboring blocks, they tell me , they can go through hundreds of dollars worth of candy based just in the vicinity of Garden Place.

The mood is frantic. I watch as the people passing candy try to limit the trees of tricks or jokes to one piece each, but the children are industrious. One in a black bodysuit who tells me he’s dressed as “nothing” brags that if a bowl is left unattended, he’ll take “20 pieces”. Luca Maltese, a 10-year-old boy who is dressed as Tom Cruise Top Gun and he stands in the middle of the road with his father (who wears a hat and is dressed in a “Tom Cruise hairstyle”), he comes from nearby Cobble Hill to get the goodies. “The best houses are the ones with the most decorations,” Maltese tells me, adding that he plans to stay out “until every house is closed.” (Another attraction for parents is that the road is blocked by cars at night).

Zimmerman, who always passes out candy with a group of friends, says the night ends when all the bags are empty. When I ask him if this is the best block in town to go trick-or-treating, he looks at me with hard-earned weariness: “Please don’t advertise.”