Vampires, princesses, zombies, tinker bells, lions and tigers and bears, oh my, an assortment of action heroes and evil villains, and the odd Baltimore Raven thrown in for local flavor: literally several hundred children will stream by my house on Halloween, beginning with a smattering of wee ones, their parents in tow, trickling in before dusk, followed by a steadily growing flow until, sometime after sunset, there are kids of all ages moving up and down both sides of my block, some with parents, some without, all of them wielding shopping bags or plastic pumpkins and eager to collect their annual tribute, little tax collectors gussied up for the occasion, demanding their payment in kind (though I’m sure they wouldn’t turn down cash), measuring its value by their personal preferences for chocolaty chewiness, for sucking or crunching, for root beer, peanut butter, butterscotch, lemon, orange, cherry, grape, sour apple or just plain old gotta-have-it-give-it-to-me sugar.
That’s what Halloween is, right? Or that’s what Halloween’s supposed to be, we’d like to 
think. But more and more, that’s only what Halloween was. Why is what I just described a very real thing where I live, but not something that happens in a lot of other places? Why are children flocking to my neighborhood to trick or treat instead of raiding their own neighbors for sweet treasures? Why do many children trick or treat by car instead of walking from house to house? And what does trick or treating (or the lack thereof) say about community (or the lack thereof)?
I wouldn’t go so far as to call my Baltimore neighborhood a full-on community. With a population approaching 20,000, most people here are strangers to each other. And there is also an obvious lack of binding social institutions that connect people in meaningful ways.
However, it does play host to more direct interaction among its residents than some places. One reason is that it’s walkable, featuring a convenient, centrally located commercial area. Many people walk to the store and around the neighborhood. And, unlike many urban 
neighborhoods that have gentrified over the last twenty years or so, there is a fullness to what demographers refer to as a “population pyramid.” In other words, whereas many of America’s recently revived urban neighborhoods feature lopsided demographics (most often serving as playgrounds for middle class whites in their 20s and 30s), my neighborhood has a broader distribution of ages. That is to say, we’ve got everybody in abundance: elders, the middle aged, adults in their prime, adolescents, and children of all ages. And come the 31st, I will be standing on my front porch and handing out candy by the fistful as those children flood the streets, garbed in an endless variety of costumes, and uttering the traditional Halloween threat as they approach.
What kind of cut rate candy should I be handing out? Will my house suffer the ravages of eggs, toilet paper, shaving cream? And just what does this all mean? Stay tuned. More to come.