It’s the weekend before Halloween, and somewhere in Bushwick, a gaggle of 20-somethings dressed as Nicole Kidman’s wigs are bankrupting themselves for a warehouse rager. Meanwhile, in midtown, revelers of all ages ride the elevators of the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Library for a free costume extravaganza — one catered to nerds. Tonight is the New York Public Library’s annual Halloween costume parade, or the bibliophile’s Met Gala. Hundreds of people will stream into the library’s rooftop terrace in their best literary getups, dressed as the Caged Bird That Sings or Little Red Riding Hood “in the style of Vivienne Westwood.”
Greeting them at the library’s top floor is Frou-Frou, the tragic racehorse from Anna Karenina, who’s really a kindly New York Public Library page checking attendee registration in a funny equine helmet. The page, whose real name is P. Henry, has technically never read the Russian classic — as they inform me, they’re an Edith Wharton gal at the moment. “But I know about the horse.”
Nearby, the library’s would-be Count Vronsky and VP of public programming, Fay Rosenfeld, surveys the incoming crowd. “People just think of these!” she squeals, growing audibly more excited at the sight of everyone’s outfits. She went as the Tolstoyan love interest two years ago but retired to civilian clothes after last year’s Lisbeth Salander costume flopped. “No one knew who I was!”
The NYPL Halloween costume parade, now in its sixth iteration, is a wholesome reprieve from a manic season ruled by degenerates. There are no sloshed social-media addicts scrounging for validation for their esoteric meme reference. (Even my All Fours, by Miranda July, outfit seems a bit niche here.) There are no bitchy bouncers mandating you sacrifice your firstborn to get in the door. The only moderately scandalous presence is 23-year-old Nick Portello, who is ass-out in an exposing LIRR train-conductor costume, dressed as a cunt-ified Little Engine That Could. He has already shocked a few witnesses tonight, having changed on the commute here, and is excited to see the judges’ reactions. “Tim Gunn is going to fall to the floor.”
Returning for his sixth year, the Project Runway legend is sauntering around costumeless tonight, dapper as ever in a blue checkered suit. He’s more of an NYPL devotee than a Halloween person, he confesses, a sucker to the requests of his friend and the library’s genial director of public programming, Aidan Flax-Clark. “Frankly, I’ll do anything for the New York Public Library,” Gunn says. But once, in his 20s, he and a colleague stuffed their pants with pillows and went as the Saturday Night Live act “the white asses.” Andy Warhol took their photo, which has since been lost to history, stuffed in some back issue of Interview magazine from who knows what year. “I hate to tell you, but we might have it in the library,” Flax-Clark interjects. “We have a huge periodicals division.”
What the costumes lack in salaciousness they make up for in craftsmanship and flamboyance. Last year’s winners not only wrapped themselves in head-to-toe foliage as The Secret Garden but carried around a flower-decorated trifold that they’d electrified with lights. “It was insane,” Gunn remembers. “It really was.” This year, the dynamic duo of Emily Brown and Chris Beck are hamming it up as the original 1957 version of The Cat in the Hat. “Should I tell her about my OnlyFans?” the whiskered Beck hollers when I break through the crowd of people swarming them. He’s juggling a duct-tape fishbowl, umbrella, and several books while a cake teeters precariously from his striped topper; Thing 1 and Thing 2 are bound atop Brown’s head. The duo chose Dr. Seuss’s children’s book for revolutionizing American literacy — plus, it’s basically birthday twins with Beck. This year, they’d be fine to let somebody else take first place. “I’m not competitive,” Brown says. “I like just making it.”
Who’ll give them a run for their money? Perhaps it’s Captain Nemo of Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, holding a duct-tape-and-cardboard submarine with a working tinfoil propeller and translucent yogurt lid for the window. She smiles shyly at her pipe-smoking boyfriend, a newbie to the event who’s slightly off-theme as Dial M for Murder. Near the bar, admirers inspect the long, decorated train of The Midnight Library, the 2020 fantasy novel about a suicidal woman held in library limbo and given the opportunity to choose alternate stories of her life. She’s a regal vision, Lady Liberty–like in bridalwear with hand-drawn clocks and a tilted chessboard hat. Fabric-covered book spines form paneling around her corset.
If there were an award for cuteness, it’d go to the babbling 4-year-old Ozzie. He’s The Giving Tree, and he’s matching with his 9-year-old sister Olivine in felt bibs; his twin abandoned being The Very Hungry Caterpillar to nap at home. “She’s cranky … and bossy!” Olivine blurts.
Nearly everyone is trying to shake off the looming specter of the election, which Gunn snappishly referred to as a “big pile of shit” earlier in more private quarters. There are no Hillbilly Elegy outfits to be found, thank God. But that doesn’t mean attendees shied away from politics. Pata Llano, a feisty 55-year-old assistant manager at Blick Art Materials, turns heads as a “pile of burned books,” with imitations of Fahrenheit 451, The Communist Manifesto, and other banned literature dangling over her red sequin dress. “I was originally gonna go as Ode on a Grecian Urn, but I did that costume already,” she confesses. “Also, it’s a little hard to run around in the big jar all night.” Her soft-spoken partner steps forward and introduces himself as William Blake’s “The Tyger.”
By now, the place is packed. The Three Fates sidle up a ramp, connected by string. A woman in a wheelchair tries to get past a Wild Thing, who has difficulty hearing inside of his massive spherical papier-mâché head.
“Miss, miss!” a woman crows at me in a thick Bronx accent. She introduces herself as Anne Marie Cicciu, a 70-year-old native New Yorker who just retired from teaching pediatric-cancer patients at Memorial Sloan Kettering. “I used to read that to my kids,” she says, spotting the little Giving Trees. “And I used to cry and cry.” An NYPL social butterfly, she’d attended the costume parade last year, where she first saw her friend Lisa Tobin, who’d later join her circle at the library’s Wednesday evening Scrabble group. “I said, ‘That lady with the 1,000 cranes should have won,’” Cicciu says, “and she turns around and says, ‘That was me!’” Since then, they’ve celebrated Christmas, New Year’s, and birthdays together. They’ve also snuck over to the Brooklyn Public Library to scoop up recycled shredded paper for Lisa’s costume projects.
Cicciu and her friend Kim are here as Lisa’s professional hype-women. “She does the Iron Lady,” Kim says, gushing. “She just came back from Nice!” Cicciu adds.
A few minutes later, Cicciu waves down her friend, who turns out to be The Midnight Library. “Lisa! Lisa! These are the people who love you!” she yells. Then she whispers to a few bystanders. “This is Lisa I was telling you about.”
Lisa is a blue-haired 47-year-old technical program manager at Warner Bros. and a self-proclaimed “library nerd” who’s already read 100 books this year. “Probably 98 of them I checked out from the New York Public Library,” she tells me. She lives in Harlem, where she’s also involved in a crochet-and-knitting circle at the Countee Cullen library. Many of the women in the group have become her close friends, celebrating Christmas with her, Anne, and Kim; one is even her landlord and neighbor, who rescued her from a bad living situation. “I’m gonna have surgery on my foot in December, and she’s gonna pick me up from the surgery.” After the city imposed budget cuts last year, shortening the library’s hours last year, her crochet circle shrunk; a few who worked at Harlem Hospital could no longer make it after their shifts. (This year, the NYPL and its supporters successfully rallied against a proposed $58.3 million in budget cuts.)
Lisa is living testament to the enrichment and support public libraries provide their communities. In addition to the above, she attends around 10 to 15 author talks at the library a year. Rosenfeld tells me later during the parade that nearly every event at NYPL sells out — “even in 400-person auditoriums.”
Finally, it’s time for the parade. It’s a blast, though the contestants are a little sheepish to strut their stuff, having elevator-pitched their costumes enough before. Really, this is just the cherry on top. The audience lets out a huge cheer for Dora the Explorer in her fuck-ass-bob, one of the more random costumes of the night. The Little Engine That Could saucily twirls around and exposes his behind. Cicciu gasps at each outfit as if it’s the best she’s seen in her life. “Look at that!” she exclaims. “WOW!” When Tobin arrives, Cicciu sighs in contentment. “She made that,” she tells a bystander, who replies, “That’s a friend of ours.” Cicciu jolts up in delight. “Oh, you know Lisa!”
The ultimate champions of the competition are the massive, awe-inspiring quintet behind Where the Wild Things Are, who started plotting their eight-foot-tall costumes immediately after winning runner-up at last year’s competition. The elaborate process involved 36-inch balloons, découpage, plaster of Paris, and plenty of frantic searching on YouTube. “It looks like a monster was murdered in my apartment — there’s black fur everywhere,” 57-year-old producer Pamela Moschetti tells me, plopping her large costume head on the ground. Their crew’s Douglas, whose cockatoo onesie came together with plenty of hot glue, revealed that he flew from Florida to be here.
The Wild Things are happy to have won, but they don’t really consider it a personal victory — they’re just glad they completed their project and got to see everyone else’s. “The woman with the books? The library? Oh my God. I mean, hands down, I think she should have won,” Moschetti says. Tobin left the event without any official recognition — the runners-up were The Cat in the Hat and the burned books. But as she walked out with her two devoted friends, it seemed that the prize had been with her all along.
Correction: A previous version of this story stated that the NYPL auditoriums could fit 4,000 people. The capacity is 400.