“I imagine they’re not happy,” he conceded, referring to Historic Hudson Valley. He rejected suggestions that Rise of the Jack-O’-Lanterns had merely copied Westchester’s formula, saying that his exhibit, unlike the Blaze, had no large-scale sculptures like dinosaurs and included references to pop culture, like Justin Bieber and Derek Jeter. Pollock said that he and his team had contacted Historic Hudson Valley in the hope of working together, but the group had demurred. It is perhaps no surprise that the producer of the for-profit display, Michael Pollock, a technology entrepreneur, lives in Ossining, N.Y., a quick broomstick ride south of the original Blaze at Van Cortlandt Manor. Like the display in Westchester, it features a mix of 5,000 real and fake pumpkins, and the trail takes about 45 minutes to traverse. What did the pumpkin have to do with Ripley’s? “This pumpkin weighs an unbelievable 1,400 pounds, nearly the same as the world’s heaviest man, Walter Hudson, who is featured in our first gallery,” said Michael Hirsch, the president and general manager of the company’s Times Square location.Īnother Halloween upstart this season is Rise of the Jack-O’-Lanterns at the Old Westbury Gardens on Long Island. Fitzpatrick etched the visage of the “world’s fattest zombie” onto the pumpkin the result was a combination of Shrek and Mr. On Thursday, he set to work in the lobby on a giant pumpkin grown in Cattaraugus County, N.Y. Inside Ripley’s Believe It or Not Times Square, the pumpkin carver Sean Fitzpatrick was more worried about throngs of tourists than bushy-tailed rodents. The garden is using pepper spray to thwart squirrel attacks. For six months we’ve been talking about this exhibit, and they have been sending me sketches.” “It’s a whole different audience than we usually see at the garden so it’s fantastic,” said Karen Daubmann, the garden’s director of exhibitions and seasonal displays. “We wanted to carve the world-record holder, so that was sad.”įor the New York Botanical Garden, the pumpkin carving and exhibit, which began two years ago, has meant more visitors at a time of year when attendance usually waned. “It sprang a leak and rotted on the way,” Mr. The property is now blanketed with more than 5,000 pumpkins, all intricately carved and some combined into towering orange sculptures. That is when Historic Hudson Valley, a nonprofit group, begins planning its Great Jack-O’-Lantern Blaze, now in its eighth year on the grounds of Van Cortlandt Manor, an 18th-century farmstead in Croton-on-Hudson, N.Y. How do you make an inert orange fruit exciting? For one thing, you start work a year ahead of time.
And competing pumpkin displays in Westchester County and on Long Island both claim about 5,000 blazing orbs. Ripley’s Believe It or Not in Times Square trucked in a similarly humongous specimen (1,417 pounds) for its master carver. The New York Botanical Garden has an 1,872-pound pumpkin that provided the raw materials for a tableau depicting a zombie apocalypse. With Halloween on the horizon, pumpkins have become objects of spectacle, showmanship and competition, as displays across the New York region strive to be bigger, better and more bravura in their use of the no-longer-humble member of the gourd family. Forget jack-o’-lanterns and even the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown.
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