Walk down 17th Avenue NE on the last Friday in October and you will lose track of which decade you're in. A hearse pulled by a skeleton horse sits parked in someone's yard. A porch has been rebuilt into a movie set. Somewhere on 18th Avenue, a dermatologist named Liz Arrington and her husband Rob will once again turn their home between Locust and Cherry into a full alien invasion, complete with a downed spacecraft in the front bed where the azaleas usually go.
This isn't a scattered handful of enthusiastic homeowners. It's an organized, decades-old civic event that the neighborhood association runs with permits, hired officers, and a judged contest with named winners. If you already live in Historic Old Northeast, the useful thing to know isn't that Halloween here is a big deal. You've seen the photos on your neighbor's porch. What's worth understanding is that the event has infrastructure, that infrastructure shifts slightly every year, and that the version you remember from three Octobers ago is not necessarily the version happening this year.
Where it actually started
The neighborhood's reputation as St. Pete's Halloween epicenter predates any formal organization. But the modern version has a traceable origin. Starting in the late 1990s, a resident named Cynthia Serra on 10th Avenue and a friend started dressing up as the Wicked Witches of Old Northeast, parading through the streets in a convertible and tossing candy to trick-or-treaters. That informal tradition eventually folded into what is now the Historic Old Northeast Neighborhood Association's official annual Halloween Decorating Contest.
HONNA itself has been around since 1974, one of the oldest neighborhood associations in the city, representing more than 2,500 residents today. Halloween is just one of the events it organizes, but it's the one that draws people from outside the neighborhood in the thousands.
The blocks move more than you'd think
Ask three longtime residents where the "real" action is and you'll get three slightly different answers, because the association's own description of the footprint has moved from year to year. Coverage of the 2024 season placed the closed-street epicenter on 17th and 18th Avenues NE running from Walnut Street to 1st Street, with trick-or-treating running 5 to 9 p.m. A year later, a recap of the 2025 season described the density concentrated a block over, between 16th and 18th Avenues NE, running from Locust Street to Beach Drive. Go back further and the pattern holds. In 2014, residents on 17th Avenue were already pulling permits to close their block for the night and hiring off-duty officers who patrolled from 7:15 until 10:15 p.m., proof that organized security has been part of this event for over a decade even as the exact blocks involved keep shifting.
None of these accounts are wrong. The footprint of the event simply grows and moves as more homeowners opt in and more blocks pursue their own street closure permits in a given year. That matters if you're planning your evening around a specific stretch of pavement you remember from a few Octobers back. The safer move, every year, is to check HONNA's current posting rather than navigate by memory. This is a volunteer-run event, not a fixed city festival, and its shape changes with who signs up to close their block that season.
An actual contest, with actual winners
The decorating isn't just competitive in spirit. HONNA runs a formal contest with named categories, and the association publishes winners each year with their addresses. In 2024, the Halloweeniest Display award went to Debbie and Tom Ritschel at 136 8th Avenue NE for a haunted graveyard complete with a full costumed Grim Reaper. Most Creative Display went to Vicky and Manny Vilaret, who followed up their previous year's Hotel California tribute with a Game of Thrones themed build they called Game of Bones.
That same year is worth noting for a different reason. Two hurricanes moved through the region that October, and HONNA's own recap of the event made a point of saying the storms didn't dampen the neighborhood's Halloween spirit, with thousands of trick-or-treaters still turning out for the displays. For a neighborhood that spent much of that fall dealing with storm cleanup, the fact that the contest still ran and still drew crowds says something about how embedded this tradition is in the neighborhood's calendar. It isn't optional programming that gets cancelled when the year gets hard. It's treated as something to protect.
The scale backs that up. Reporting from the Tampa Bay Times in late October 2025 put attendance at more than 4,000 trick-or-treaters flowing through the neighborhood in a single night, a figure that dwarfs what most St. Petersburg neighborhoods see for any single evening event.
What hosting actually requires
If you're new to a block that participates, or you're weighing whether to join in this year, the prep looks less like hanging a few string lights and more like running a small pop-up event. Residents who do this seriously describe a checklist that includes:
- Buying candy in bulk, then buying more, because volume estimates routinely undershoot actual turnout
- Filing for a street closure permit if your block wants to shut down to traffic for the evening
- Budgeting for off-duty police officers if your street expects heavy foot traffic, since some blocks hire their own for crowd management
- Protecting sod and sprinkler heads with barriers, since thousands of feet moving through a residential yard leave a mark
- Recruiting help for candy distribution, since a single person handing out treats to a moving crowd of hundreds will not keep pace
None of this is city-mandated. It's the informal standard that's developed because the crowds got big enough to need it.
The neighborhood isn't alone, but it is the reference point
Old Northeast draws the crowds, but it isn't the only St. Petersburg neighborhood leaning into the season. A few miles away, Crescent Heights runs its own tradition centered on 25th Avenue N between 4th and 9th Streets, known for residents hanging illuminated jack-o'-lanterns from trees rather than full yard displays. Greater Woodlawn organizes trick-or-treating around Woodlawn Circle. Euclid St. Paul hosts a Haunted Hike billed as one of the city's more paranormal-themed walks.
| Neighborhood | Core streets | Format |
|---|---|---|
| Historic Old Northeast | 17th and 18th Avenues NE | Closed-street block party, judged contest, thousands of visitors |
| Crescent Heights | 25th Avenue N, 4th to 9th Streets | Illuminated pumpkins hung from trees, informal parade |
| Greater Woodlawn | Woodlawn Circle | Neighborhood trick-or-treating |
| Euclid St. Paul | Neighborhood-wide | Haunted Hike walking event |
None of these compete with Old Northeast on scale, and residents in other parts of the city treat a visit to 17th and 18th Avenues as the main event, with their own neighborhood's activities as a warm-up.
What this means if you're already here
If you've lived in Old Northeast for a while, you probably have your own relationship with this tradition already, whether that's decorating your own porch, driving out for the weekend before the crowds peak, or bracing for the parking crunch on your street. The one thing worth changing about how you plan for it is treating the details as annual rather than fixed. Check HONNA's site in early October for the current year's closed blocks, posted hours, and contest entry information before you commit an evening to a specific stretch of the neighborhood. The tradition is consistent. The exact footprint isn't, and the volunteers running it deserve the credit for keeping something this large functioning every year without a city budget behind it.
If you're weighing what it's like to actually live inside a neighborhood that takes on a personality like this every fall, alongside its Candlelight Tour of Homes, its garden strolls, and its year-round porch parties, that's the kind of neighborhood texture worth talking through. I'm always happy to walk through what daily life looks like block by block. Reach out to Drift Home Realty and schedule a free consultation whenever you're curious what else is happening in the neighborhoods I work in.
