Families and friends lined Hanover and Battery streets Saturday to cheer a procession featuring splashes of color, costumes and expressions of community pride in Boston’s oldest neighborhood.
Maria Lanza, the event’s long time emcee, said the North End’s 74th annual Halloween Parade is a generational celebration of community, one you can witness as children grow.
“You see them when their parents are carrying them across the stage, then they’re walking, then they’re talking, it’s so cute,” she said. “It’s fun to see people our age now having kids and they’re bringing them back.”
Her father, Kenny Lanza, who helped organize the event with the Madonna Della Cava Society, handed out candy to children after the parade, their eyes wide with excitement. He said what keeps him coming back each year is “seeing the joy on the kids’ faces…especially when you tell them they can take more than one candy.”
Around them, families lingered to enjoy the afternoon while their children tumbled through bounce houses, as laughter and music carried down the streets.
Justin Amoroso, known locally as DJ Ammo, took the stage and played music that energized families dancing alongside historic brick storefronts.
“This parade has been around forever,” he said, adding that because generations who grew up with it keep coming back, the community tradition “will never die.”