Halloween is over, but what to do with all the rotting Jack-o’-lantern corpses? Smash them, obviously.
Hudson River Park invited New Yorkers to its yearly Pumpkin Smash at Pier 84 on Saturday to smash their gourds into pieces for compost, while educating visitors of all ages on how composting helps divert seasonal organic waste from landfills.
According to National Geographic, “pumpkin pollution” can be scarier than Halloween: millions of decoratively carved pumpkins end up in landfills after the holiday, only to turn into Methane, a greenhouse gas that can retain 25 times more heat than carbon dioxide.
New Yorkers and tourists obliterated 3,054.5 pounds of pumpkin at the rain-free event with seasonable temperatures. Most brought their own pumpkins, which were weighed before they were (sometimes savagely) mutilated, and every hour, prizes were awarded to those who had the heaviest pumpkin.
For some, smashing the pumpkins with a bat or hammer was a therapeutic exercise.
Steve and Jeanne Scott heard about the free, family-friendly event on the news, and it was their first time participating. The Hells Kitchen residents agreed that it was cathartic to smash the pumpkins into smithereens.
“This is great fun for the young and the old,” Jeanne said.
“They’re going to mulch it up and use it for future crops, so that’s great, but it’s a lot of fun,” said Steve, who noted that the DJ should be playing music by the rock band Smashing Pumpkins. “You get your sledgehammer, or you throw it. You let out some energy.”
Lauren Amick attended the event with her friend Joe Cabatit and her mom Pat, who was visiting from St. Louis. Amick said she felt great, “It gets your aggression out.”
Jerry Maranion and his wife stumbled across the event by chance. He didn’t bring a pumpkin, but the Hudson River Park had extra gourds handy.
Maranion thought smashing pumpkins was “exhilarating.”
“I actually kind of want to do it again,” he said. “I’m going to get a bigger one now.”
Dad Robert Schwarz, on the other hand, saw the event as an educational tool to teach his kids about the importance of composting.
“I’m teaching the kids more about composting and waste diversion than about anger management through smashing things,” Schwarz, a self-proclaimed “master composter,” said. “That seems a little dysfunctional.”
Brooklyn-based Bindlestiff Family Cirkus entertained the crowd with acrobats on stilts and clowns while “Pumpkin Spirit” Mariko Iwasa helped usher the pumpkin souls to “the other side” with the help of a fortuneteller, who read the remains of the pumpkins.
“Similar to reading tea leaves, the way the seeds are still attached, the way the stem might be attached or have it decapitated suddenly, it says a lot about the smasher,” the fortuneteller explained. “So I’m here to provide any sort of information if they so desire. Some people don’t want to know.”
Other activities included an arts and crafts table and a science station where visitors could check the pumpkin’s “guts” under a microscope.
Susan Watford and her son Grayson were visiting from England because her husband is running in the TCS New York City Marathon on Sunday.
“We wanted to do one of these Circle Line tours,” Watford explained. “And then we saw that this pumpkin smash was on, so we thought we’d come visit and see what it is all about.”
Her son Grayson thought it was “really cool” to see what was inside a pumpkin.
“It felt like you’re actually inside of the pumpkin. You could feel it,” Grayson Watford said.
According to Hudson River Park’s website, a third of all New York City waste is food or yard scraps, and its Community Compost Program supports the Big Apple’s zero-waste goals. The composting program, which has been around since 2015, turns over several hundred thousand pounds of food scraps and yard waste into compost each year.
The also park hosts compost-focused education programs and workshops, including the annual Pumpkin Smash, for the community to learn about best composting practices, and the public can drop off their food scraps at 10 sites throughout the park from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. every day.
