Upper East SIde wild with Halloween Staged..read NY TIMES A nightmare on Park Avenue

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/21/nyregion/oh-the-horror-the-horror-of-upper-east-side-halloween-decor.html?nl=nyregion&emc=edit_ur_20121021

At no point is the East Side’s submission to child-centeredness more aggressively in evidence than in the days leading up to Oct. 31; we are now in the era of what one Park Avenue exile calls “a hedge-fund Halloween.” By this she means the relatively new tradition among town-house owners, mostly between Fifth Avenue and Lexington Avenue, to appoint the stoops and facades of their buildings as if someone had asked them to enact a particular 0.01 percent nightmare: “Imagine that you’d failed to acquire some of the most expensive real estate on earth. Pretend you lived in Brooklyn instead, and not in Cobble Hill but in Dyker Heights, that distant precinct famous for its polyvinyl snowmen and street-clogging paeans to Christmas.”

Some people might wonder what extremely wealthy people would do with potential further cuts to the capital gains tax, but these people don’t realize how many hay bales there are in the world, how many glitter pumpkins, mock corpses, enormous fake spiders, moving cobwebs and mechanical skeletons to buy and stage. For several years now, Marc Lasry, the co-founder of Avenue Capital, has decorated his mansion on East 74th Street with bloodied bodies hanging from the balcony, skeleton heads, a giant inflatable ghost, swinging bats and a life-size, clothed skeleton affixed to a tree on the sidewalk. One afternoon last week, tourists and children gathered to take pictures of a dancing skeleton beside the front door. It was singing“Super Freak.” (Perhaps in the spirit of competition, the hedge fund manager Philip A. Falcone and his wife, Lisa Maria, have lavishly decorated the exterior of their 27,525-square-foot house on East 67th Street even though it is currently a construction site.)

In the East 90s, similar expressions of enthusiasm abound and multiply. A town house on 91st Street between Park and Lexington features a giant inflatable coffin from which a vampire pops up every few seconds. On top of the stoop, guarding the front door, is an approximately eight-foot-tall plastic witch. Skeleton heads are submerged in the landscapin