One of the most popular public events ever staged at what the public popularly calls Times Square is the annual Safe Trick or Treat.

This year’s Safe Trick or Treat will be held tomorrow from 5 p.m. to 7 p.m. It may be the last year the newspaper will be on the site and thus the event’s organizer. The town is actively considering selling the property, including the stage, to an individual who plans to create a private entertainment venue there.

The newspaper first organized the Halloween get-together in 1997, having no idea that it would join the Christmas Parade as the two best attended local activities in downtown each year. Neither comes close to matching the tourist-centric street sales, mind you. They pull people from far and wide. But the Safe Trick or Treat and parade are aimed at local folks and are the go-to events for young Isle of Wight couples with children.

The actual Safe Trick or Treat event, which involves businesses and clubs giving out candy to children who parade along Main Street, is just the visible conclusion of something very special. Entire families spend weeks dreaming up the costumes they will wear as a group when they join the parade and the costume contest on the town stage afterward.

The whole downtown Halloween experience that exists today — including, spectacularly, the decorations along Grace Street — grew out of this effort to provide families a safe environment in which their children could spend an evening pretending to be superheroes, ghouls, darling princesses or traditional cowboys and pirates.

And, though few people today realize it, the Safe Trick or Treat was not the brainchild of The Smithfield Times. Credit for the concept goes to the now defunct Real Smithfield Jaycees, who saw the need to corral kids into a safe Halloween event way back in 1988. The Jaycees, an extraordinarily active group of young business people, back then put together the idea of a Safe Trick or Treat, including a costume contest, and held it around the Town Hall on Institute Street. 

The events continued under Jaycees sponsorship for nearly a decade and morphed into a popular haunted house that the Jaycees cobbled together in their headquarters building — now, the VFW headquarters. That was a fundraising activity for the Jaycees, but the club continued the Safe Trick or Treat aspect of the evening for a brief period.

Declining membership took its toll on the Jaycees and its activities, and in the mid-1990s, the organized Halloween activities ended.

That’s when we stepped in to resurrect what we thought was a worthwhile activity. Most Main Street businesses agreed to participate and in 1997, The Smithfield Times launched what it billed as the “First Annual Halloween in Times Square.” 

The event took advantage of recent improvements on “the square.” The newspaper building had recently been enlarged and remodeled to present a more institutional appearance, and an old concert stage, built of plywood panels with no roof, had been demolished and replaced by a lighted and roofed gazebo. The stage was built to accommodate the summer concerts, but quickly became a more widely used public venue. The Safe Trick or Treat seemed like a natural addition.

Once the program had been resurrected, it grew rapidly, and within a couple of years was attracting well over a thousand people each Halloween.

Within a few years, Grace Street residents turned their community into a stroll through Halloween’s best in make believe. 

COVID-19 set the program back, and since then several groups have staged competing “Trunk or Treat” events that have drawn off some of the downtown crowd. Nevertheless, Main Street’s Safe Trick or Treat remains a mainstay activity for area families each fall.

 

John Edwards is publisher emeritus of The Smithfield Times. His email address is j.branchedwards@gmail.com.