Fun on Fifth Trunk Or Treat Halloween Festival

When and Where

When: October 24, 2026 (tentative)
Timeline: 3:00 pm — 8:00 pm Date follows the festival's usual fourth Saturday of October; the 5th Avenue BID has not posted 2026 yet.

Location: 5th Avenue between 72nd and 85th Streets, Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, NY

On the last full weekend of October, a long stretch of Fifth Avenue closes to cars and fills up with pumpkins. The Trunk or Treat Halloween Festival is run by the 5th Avenue BID together with Brooklyn Bridge Parents, and it has grown every year since it started: rides, a pumpkin patch, a puppet show, music, crafts, haunted trucks, and a line of decorated car trunks handing out candy to what feels like every child in Bay Ridge.

Troop 23 is not running a trunk this year, and the festival does not need us to be good — it is one of the better afternoons the neighborhood puts on, and if you have a costume in the house it is worth the walk. What follows is what the afternoon is like, what our own two years in it looked like, and where to find the troop this fall instead.

The Scary Ambulance

For two years Troop 23 held a spot at 8211 Fifth Avenue with something nobody else on the block had: a decommissioned ambulance, decorated to be frightening, with two canopies beside it, the American flag, the troop flag, a table of flyers, and scouts in costume handing out candy from the back of it.

It worked the way that sort of thing works. Children came for the ambulance and stayed for the candy; parents read the flyers while they waited. Scouts logged real service hours for the setup, the five hours of standing, and the cleanup afterwards — and the cleanup, as ever, was the part that separated the scouts who had understood the assignment from the ones who had come for the candy.

The first year was 2023, when the festival itself was only in its second season. The second was 2024, and that page ends with a line worth repeating here: thanks to Tom, Soo and Liam, who did the organising both times. An ambulance does not park itself on Fifth Avenue.

Going This Year

The festival runs through the afternoon and into the evening, and it is free. Bring a costume and a bag; the trunk-or-treating is the heart of it, but the rides, the pumpkin patch and the puppet show are what turn it from twenty minutes into an afternoon.

A few things worth knowing from having worked it twice:

• Come earlier than you think. The candy at the popular trunks does not last the full window, and the crowd near the middle of the closed stretch gets genuinely thick by late afternoon.
• Fifth Avenue closes, so the side streets fill. Parking near the festival is a project. From most of Bay Ridge it is a shorter walk than a drive.
• The organisers post the details. Times, the exact blocks and the trunk map come from the 5th Avenue BID, usually a couple of weeks out, and they are the ones to trust over anything written here in advance.

Fifth Avenue, Bay Ridge

Where to Find Troop 23 This Fall

Five hours behind a candy table puts a troop in front of a great many people and gives almost none of them a chance to ask a question — which is a fair description of a street festival rather than a complaint about one. The things that actually answer a parent's questions are quieter, and this year the troop's effort is in those.

The simplest is a Monday evening. The troop meets at Our Lady of Angels on 73rd Street, ten minutes' walk from the festival's own stretch of Fifth Avenue. Nobody needs to sign up or call ahead — a scout-aged boy and a parent can simply come, watch a meeting happen, and leave with an answer either way.

If you would rather see the troop outdoors before deciding, the autumn is full of it: a skills weekend that opens the scouting year, a shooting-sports weekend at Ten Mile River, and the public commitments the neighborhood already sees us at — the 9/11 vigil on the pier in September and the Third Avenue Festival a fortnight later.

Start at How to Join if you want the short version first.

This Festival, Year by Year

Each of these pages is that year as it was written at the time:

• 2025 — the festival ran; the troop did not have a trunk.
• 2024 — our second year, and the ambulance's.
• 2023 — our first, when the festival was in its second season.

Bay Ridge asks a lot of its volunteer groups in October, and the troop is out in the neighborhood all autumn — see this year's calendar for where.