Happy witches, smiling ghosts

Brandi Cruger, 9, worked with intense concentration. Photo by Jason Fields

By Jason Fields

The kids painting shop windows for Halloween on West 235th Street and Oxford Avenue had a little run in with an angry store manager and the police Sunday afternoon.

The manager of the Rite Aid ran out of his store and told a mother to gather her children, clean up his window and take off.

Apparently his boss forgot to give him the word that the drugstore was a paid participant in the 53rd annual Kiwanis Club of Riverdale Halloween windowpainting contest.

In fact, the manager was mad enough to attract the attention of passing police officers from the 50th Precinct. They told him to calm down, Kiwanis emissaries showed up to explain what was going on, and the manager swiveled around and stormed back into his store.

After the confrontation, the kid’s painting still gleamed garishly in the sun.

Grandparents, parents and children were gathered on a beautiful, sundrenched late-October to participate in a Riverdale tradition.

The little ones — and medium-sized ones — held paintbrushes in their hands, with lips pursed and fierce concentration in their eyes. Ghosts, witches and pumpkins were slowly taking shape under their careful ministrations on windows that enclosed banks, restaurants and drugstores. If it weren’t for the smiles and bright sunlight, it could have, just possibly, been creepy.

“It’s a happy witch,” Kristin Sheehan, 10, said. Despite the stereotypical black, pointed hat and black gown, the head of Kristin’s witch would have done any 1970s smiley-face button proud.

Kristin and three other friends from St. Gabriel’s school were working on the windows of the Blue Bay Diner, an institution of counters and booths that’s been a fixture forever.

Batu Petru, standing a little farther south on the block, has owned restaurants on Johnson Avenue for 27 years, first one called The Place, and now Café Blue. He has participated in the event every year he’s been on the block. One year, the kid painting his window was the winner of the event.

“I remember one girl, 15 years ago,” Mr. Petru said. “I’m Romanian, so she drew Dracula. … Nice kids.”

The day is really less a contest and more of a way to bring out the neighborhood, Kiwanis’s former local leader, Vincent Pistone, said. His wife, Miriam, spoke a little about the quality of the work.

“If you want to see real art, go to a museum,” she said. “I happen to like children’s art, but that’s not the point.”

The point, she said, was to participate.

Last year’s winner, Charlotte Blackman is now a sixth grader at Fieldston. She had been assigned the Capital One Bank window and was creating an enormous and elaborate scene, including spiky trees with angry yellow faces, a pumpkin you wouldn’t want to mess with on a dark street and a forbidding black castle sitting ominously in the two-dimensional distance.

“I was experimenting with different things and this happened,” the 11-yearold said. She’s been participating in the event since kindergarten.

Howard Rondinone remembers painting these same windows — many with different stores behind them — in the 1970s, now it’s his son Peter, 9, who is holding the paintbrush and creating his own ghosts.

Brandi Cruger, 9, who had a slice of the CVS window on West 235th Street, paid great attention to detail, choosing mainly smaller brushes and scrunching her face to make sure every drip of paint was just so.

“I think it’s going to be beautiful,” she said. And Brandi already had an idea of what she would do with the money, if she won the $50 or even $25 prize.

“It’s an Easy-Bake Oven,” she said. Not every storeowner participated in the contest, with Place of Japan instead sporting a notice from Assemblyman Jeffrey Dinowitz calling on people to report graffiti and graffiti vandals to the authorities.

Mr. Dinowitz would surely take no offense to this particular use of paint in public places. And besides, just a little water is enough to remove the specially formulated paint.

And the winners are:

Grand Prize:
Co-winners: Courtney Estevez, 12
Ashley Martinez, 12

Best Halloween Theme:
1st Place: Alexandra Stern, 13
2nd Place: Julia Baron, 6

Originality:
1st Place: Charlotte Blackman, 11
2nd Place: Sofia Pozo-Schmidt, 10

Artistic Ability:
1nd Place: Stephanie Langier, 10
Madeline Capella, 6
2nd Place: Summer Queally, 11

Most Humorous:
1st Place: Jesse Fields, 8
2nd Place: Meaghan Donahue, 11

This is part of the October 29, 2009 online edition of The Riverdale Press.

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