Best Halloween Neighborhoods in America

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A great Halloween is not really about the candy, despite the youthful ambitions of an epic sugar haul. Like any holiday, it's about a shared celebration of traditions and rituals, the trappings here being spooky costumes, individually wrapped chocolates and all things pumpkin. In fact, Halloween is arguably more community-oriented than other holidays -- when was the last time you walked around your neighborhood on Thanksgiving, greeting friends and strangers alike, sampling a turkey leg here, some cranberry sauce there?

In that civic-minded spirit, we set out on a quest to find the best neighborhoods for Halloween, the places that go above and beyond in their celebrations. Some were renowned for being trick-or-treating hotspots, with streets lined with DIY decorations and crowded with thousands of pint-sized witches and superheroes. Others took a more adult-oriented approach, with masquerade balls remixed as rowdy street parties. And in some cases, it was all about the pumpkins, the bigger and more numerous the better. 

The common thread among all of the celebrations? It turns out -- unsurprisingly, perhaps -- that a neighborhood's Halloween celebration typically fits its everyday character. The hip urban districts have the biggest parties, the Bohemian enclaves have the puppet-filled parades and the small towns have the timelessly wholesome traditions conjured by Norman Rockwell. The many flavors of Halloween showcase the varied identities of the nation.

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1. Beacon Hill, Boston

Beacon Hill is a trick-or-treater’s paradise, where immaculately preserved brick row houses line narrow cobblestone streets, creating an atmospheric sense of history and a pedestrian-friendly urban density. Halloween here is a point of community pride -- many houses are decorated with spiders and skeletons, and two streets are blocked off to cars. Last year, residents organized a rapid clean-up effort to keep the festivities going after Hurricane Sandy hit on October 30.