BY KELLY MCGRATH
There was chaos at this year’s 34th annual Tompkins Square Halloween Dog Parade last Saturday as at least 20,000 spectators descended on the East Village amidst last minute route changes, crushing crowds, cellular data blockages, and misinformation. Local news outlets like WABC Eyewitness News and Pix11 published incorrect information about the parade just hours prior to its start, creating confusion for participants and attendees.
Each year dogs and their owners don spooky and striking costumes and parade alongside and through the park celebrating and raising funds for the city’s oldest and largest community dog run, but growing lack of neighborhood support for this yearly tradition threatens to run it into the ground. Its latest organizer, Joseph Borduin, has said this year is his last.
The parade usually concludes inside the Tompkins Square Park Dog Run and ends with the costume contest. But because of construction in the park, it ended on a side street, and there was no costume contest for this year. Neither was made clear to participants who gathered in the park after the parade anyways.
Nicole Petiet and her dog Wheezy were among those in the park after the parade who were left a little confused. “I was planning on entering the contest, but is there one?” asked Petiet, “I haven’t been able to look at my phone with all the data blockages.”
Michelle Vasquez and her dog, Olive also participated in the parade last Saturday and said that she’d been watching the dog run’s social media throughout the day waiting for updates but those never came.
The parade has become a highly anticipated East Village tradition that attracts tens of thousands of spectators and hundreds of participants, but the event’s own popularity is its curse according to the Borduin, this year’s parade producer, who quit after Saturday.
Borduin says that the parade lacks local community and city support, “I didn’t have my walk-through with the city until 2:30,” Borduin said on Friday, “A lot of the decisions are not made by myself yet I will get the blame for it.”
“The neighborhood has to be involved more,” Borduin said, “The businesses that benefit from 20,000 spectators.”
The parade’s inception was in the 1980s after community members first fought against City Hall to establish the dog run. The parade was initially small and low cost and has increased in size each year since. The money raised goes towards the dog run’s yearly maintenance. The last three years the parade has either lost money or broken even, according to Borduin, causing him to pay out of pocket for this year’s fees and to question the point of fundraising.
Borduin, a photographer, was volunteering to scoop poop in the dog run in 2020 when the parade’s old producer, “pretty much gave me a stack of papers and said have fun.”
Borduin had no prior experience in event planning or parade planning but did not want to see the parade canceled. He has been frustrated since with a lack of community support for the only community dog run and has had numerous bad experiences including an incident last year where spectators spit on him after they couldn’t see the costume contest’s stage.
Now Borduin says, “Let a merchant group do the parade and the dog run can do a best in show.”