Halloween Windows Bloomsburg 2009

Every year Bloomsburg area students paint the windows of businesses along Main Street for Halloween. This weekend a fire destroyed three historic storefront buildings on Main Street, a terrible tragedy for those who operated businesses there or who lost everything in the apartments above. By comparison, the three painted Halloween windows that no longer exist are minor. They were designed to be emphemeral, and would have been washed off in a few weeks anyway. But they were some of my favorites, so it feels nice to know they live on here.

The demon baby, at top, made a strange and apt pairing with demon chipmunk. above, on the same storefront at Main and Jefferson. If the chipmunk didn't look so demented, it would probably be my selection for Cutest Window: as it is, it's in a category by iteself.

Halloween ala Sendak, below, was on the former Town Camera storefront.

Some of the images worked especially well in their settings. This coy little French Maid of a Witchlette (below left) hovered behind the bench in front of VanDyke Goldsmith and incorporated the store's logo and architectural elements behind the glass. It could've all been too much, but it works. And the embracing mummy and skeleton in the window of the Cloak and Dragon bookstore worked with the exisiting colors of the window frame in a challenging tall narrow space... a reminder to us all that no one loves you like your mummy.

For sheer mayhem, I like the splashy colors and Day-of-the-Dead energy of this graveyard scene, above.

And this geeky scene on the window of The Vision Center (I'm not making this up) has wild color and a 3-d effect on that dangling eyeball that just doesn't come across in the photo.

The pair below just seem made for each other: on the left, a skeletal figure stands beneath a tree with leaves like detached hands, and at right, a scruffy soothsayer with a crystal ball swirling with ghosts.

Ghouls in formal attire was a recurring theme this year. Here's one of my favorites on a Tim Burton theme. The imagie nicely incorporates the merchandise in The Costume Shop window behind it, too. (Note the butterfly shape paired with the bat-tie, and the red plastic pitchfork on the left...a perfect accessory for the corpse-groom out for a night on the town...)

Finally, I think this one (along with the demon baby that begins this page) is tied for my favorite. The seketal figure puttin' on the Ritz below is on the papered window of a vacant storefront on Main Street. Too many of those these days, but this makes the most of a bad situation...(It would be just about perfect if those were the Society pages behind him.)