What’s so scary about kids on the street?

By Joe Wilson

Lock the doors! Call the H.O.A.! It’s Halloween, the one night each year when we face the most terrifying objects of our imagination:

Youth on the street. 

There is indeed a certain, almost unnerving aptness to Halloween as the “scary” holiday. If you tossed just about every stereotypical suburban fear into a bubbling cauldron, you would probably end up with a potion that smelled an awful lot like trick-or-treating.  

Imagine it: young people, often strangers, out late at night, in strange garb, sometimes without formal supervision, taking over the street – the mind boggles at every clause!

And yet, despite the goblins and ghouls, Halloween is probably the single night of the year when most of us feel most safe on the street. 

We feel safer from cars, because there are different norms about where pedestrians are expected and allowed. And we feel safer from people, because there’s enough nightlife to enforce (and reinforce) social behavior – consider Jane Jacobs’s eyes on the street. 

And, in most neighborhoods, it’s all done without formal measures. There are no traffic-calming structures, no police; it’s a self-governed system of liveliness. It’s almost, dare I say, an act of guerilla urbanism – for one night each year, we get together to show off what our streets could be. 

And then everything goes back to normal. 

We return the streets to cars (or to emptiness), we go back to being afraid of strangers, and we forget that anything else is possible.  

In fairness, regular nightlife probably isn’t possible in a typical suburban neighborhood, but we might ask ourselves whether it’s really so bad to knock on a neighbor’s door, to let kids off the sidewalk, to hear (or participate in) a little raucousness now and then. 

Instead, the opposite seems to be happening. Our fears have infected trick-or-treaterism, and, in a depressing twist, many are turning to a Halloween purged of its scare factor.  

It’s a turn which is, sadly, understandable. Despite the acceptance that people will be out and about, the increased foot traffic of Halloween, together with heightened drunk driving, leads to more pedestrian deaths, especially among small children. Some trunk-or-treaters would prefer to go house to house but are unable to because of dangerous and antisocial street design. 

And it bears considering whether even our idyllic image of Halloween is truly one to emulate. The classic setting is proud rows of well-spaced houses (bonus points if they’re in New England). Is it a picture that’s inclusive of other housing types? Is it classist? From Peanuts to Stranger Things, the most prominent representations of trick-or-treating are undeniably white- and middle-class-coded. Would I be as accepting of children at my door if they spoke differently than I do? 

Ultimately, the point should not be to replicate our archetypical Halloween but to learn from it. What makes a good trick-or-treat street is not just streetlights or sidewalks but also social behavior. It’s a street that’s physically accessible, but it’s also a street where drivers expect and accept humans in the roadway. It’s a street where strangers can walk without judgement, where neighbors can ask each other for candy freely, where we can make noise and make a mess and have fun once in a while.  

And while that might seem scary, I’d say it’s worth the thrill. 

Feature image: still from It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown!; IMDB