At no point is the East Side’s submission to child-centeredness more aggressively in evidence than in the days leading up to Oct. 31; we are now in the era of what one Park Avenue exile calls “a hedge-fund Halloween.” By this she means the relatively new tradition among town-house owners, mostly between Fifth Avenue and Lexington Avenue, to appoint the stoops and facades of their buildings as if someone had asked them to enact a particular 0.01 percent nightmare: “Imagine that you’d failed to acquire some of the most expensive real estate on earth. Pretend you lived in Brooklyn instead, and not in Cobble Hill but in Dyker Heights, that distant precinct famous for its polyvinyl snowmen and street-clogging paeans to Christmas.”



Some people might wonder what extremely wealthy people would do with potential further cuts to the capital gains tax, but these people don’t realize how many hay bales there are in the world, how many glitter pumpkins, mock corpses, enormous fake spiders, moving cobwebs and mechanical skeletons to buy and stage. For several years now, Marc Lasry, the co-founder of Avenue Capital, has decorated his mansion on East 74th Street with bloodied bodies hanging from the balcony, skeleton heads, a giant inflatable ghost, swinging bats and a life-size, clothed skeleton affixed to a tree on the sidewalk. One afternoon last week, tourists and children gathered to take pictures of a dancing skeleton beside the front door. It was singing “Super Freak.” (Perhaps in the spirit of competition, the hedge fund manager Philip A. Falcone and his wife, Lisa Maria, have lavishly decorated the exterior of their 27,525-square-foot house on East 67th Street even though it is currently a construction site.)



In the East 90s, similar expressions of enthusiasm abound and multiply. A town house on 91st Street between Park and Lexington features a giant inflatable coffin from which a vampire pops up every few seconds. On top of the stoop, guarding the front door, is an approximately eight-foot-tall plastic witch. Skeleton heads are submerged in the landscaping. “It has become an annual tradition to judge which of these displays are the most elaborate and which are professionally done,” Philip Gorrivan, the prominent interior designer and a Carnegie Hill parent, explained to me. “There’s always a newcomer every year, a brownstone that has been completely gutted and renovated, and they’re typically the most incredible.”



It should go without saying that on the Upper East Side, where D.I.Y. is to many a foreign acronym, much of what is done in one’s home is done by someone else. In regard to Halloween, as the designer Celerie Kemble put it, “there has to be major credit-card waving and outsourcing; perhaps I’m cynical, but I’m awe-struck and a little frightened.”



When I called Ronaldo Maia, the Park Avenue florist, to inquire how he had contributed to the current holiday visuals, he described the arrangements and objects he had spent a week constructing for the exterior of a town house on Sutton Place. Another florist on Madison Avenue told me she’d decorated private elevators with corn husks, which comforted me because I’d hate to think of someone coming home alone late at night from an exhausting day in distressed securities, only to ascend to his apartment divorced from the company of dried vegetation.



As I toured the Upper East Side last week, I came to think of as utterly restrained the homeowner on East 80th Street who limited the fuss simply to 15 gourds and pumpkins.



While we might have expected to find some indignation on the part of the Carnegie Hill Neighbors, that upholder of preservation and enforcer of taste, the association turns out to be an avid supporter. For the second year in a row it will sponsor a party and costume contest, for which East 92nd Street between Madison and Park Avenues, a decorated block, will be closed. Lo van der Valk, president of the association, pointed to the importance of “private enterprise” for this booming culture of Halloween. Let the fogies, the bitter, the barren, the Scrooges flee early in horror to Palm Beach.



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