Type "Piedmont Halloween parade" into a search bar in early October and you will find a bagpiper. He leads a costume march that starts near Pet Food Express, winds past local restaurants and shops, and ends at the gates of Mountain View Cemetery. It is a genuinely good event, now in its late thirties as an annual tradition, run by the merchants of a commercial strip called Piedmont Avenue. It is also in Oakland, not in Piedmont.
That mix-up is easy to make and worth untangling, because the town of Piedmont, the small hill city under two square miles that sits above that Oakland corridor, runs its own Halloween week entirely separate from it. It has no bagpiper and no merchant parade. It has three quieter traditions instead, spread across different days, built for different ages, and none of them require driving anywhere near Piedmont Avenue.
Two Names, Two Cities
The confusion is understandable. Piedmont Avenue sits just over the city line, close enough that residents walk there for dinner without thinking about which municipality they have entered. Its Halloween parade is a business-district event, complete with trick-or-treating at participating storefronts and live music in the plaza.
The city of Piedmont has never needed that scale, because its version of Halloween was never designed to draw a crowd from outside town. It was built by families, one block at a time, with the Piedmont Recreation Department adding two small events around the edges. Knowing the difference matters if you are trying to plan an actual week, not just a single night.
The Carnival Comes First
The Recreation Department's family event happens before Halloween itself, on a weekend afternoon in Piedmont Park. It runs like a controlled, daylight version of trick-or-treating: a costume parade, candy handed out by Piedmont Police Explorers, storytime, arts and crafts, and trick-or-treating contained inside the park rather than spread across residential sidewalks. It is aimed at younger kids, roughly ages two through eight, and its whole design points toward one goal: give small children the costume experience without asking them to compete with teenagers on darkened streets a week later.
That timing choice tells you something about how the town thinks about Halloween. Rather than cramming every age group into one night, Piedmont splits the holiday by audience and lets each one happen on its own schedule.
Then the Streets Take Over
The actual trick-or-treat circuit is not organized by the city at all. No department manages it, no map gets published, and no permit gets filed. It survives because individual homeowners on specific blocks have kept it going, some of them for decades, and word of which streets go all out simply carries from one Halloween to the next.
A few blocks have held their reputations long enough to be treated as fixed points on the map:
- Ricardo Avenue, known for costumed homeowners and pumpkin carving that neighbors describe as genuinely impressive rather than store-bought.
- York Drive and Manor Drive, two blocks over from Ricardo, together forming what residents call the town's Halloween "sweet spot," a small stretch that fills with kids running house to house with overflowing bags.
- Blair Avenue into Dracena Avenue, where homeowners have hung ghosts in the trees for so many years that Piedmont Recreation's own walking club refers to it as a decades-long tradition rather than a seasonal decorating trend.
- Highland Avenue down through Wildwood, Crocker, and Lincoln, a route the Piedmont Recreation Department's Walking on Wednesdays group documented on its regular outing the week before Halloween last year, passing a ghost display at Highland and Sierra, a spider stretched across a house on Hazel Lane, and ghosts hanging from a balcony on Wildwood among burgundy maple leaves still clinging to the trees.
The decorating style itself shifts year to year. A count from Piedmont Exedra a couple of Halloweens back found skeletons had taken over as the dominant motif, showing up on Mountain, Waldo, Oakland, Craig, and Sea View avenues in place of the ghosts and pumpkins that had led in prior years.
This year adds one more variable worth knowing: Halloween lands on a Saturday. That means no school the next morning, which historically means fuller sidewalks and later crowds than the midweek Halloweens Piedmont has had recently.
A Quieter Version, for the Grown-Ups
Not every Piedmont Halloween tradition involves candy. The Recreation Department's Walking on Wednesdays group holds a guided tour of Mountain View Cemetery during Halloween week each year, led by longtime docent Jane Leroe. The group meets at the main mausoleum at 10:30 in the morning, and dogs are welcome on leash. It is a daytime, unhurried counterpart to everything happening after dark that same week, built for residents who want the ritual and the history without the sugar rush.
The same group's regular Wednesday walk earlier in the week often becomes an informal decoration tour in its own right, since its usual route already passes many of the same blocks that light up for trick-or-treating. Last year's walk drew 46 people and one dog, weaving past City Hall, the Corey Reich Tennis Center, and the Recreation Center itself, where a large skeleton display already stood outside ahead of the building's own Halloween-night event.
Building Your Own Week
Because these three traditions run on different days and pull different crowds, most Piedmont households do not try to fit all of it into one evening. A workable version of the week looks something like this: take younger kids to the Piedmont Park carnival on the weekend before Halloween, walk the Ricardo-to-Dracena stretch on Halloween night itself, and stop by the Recreation Center's own smaller trick-or-treat pit stop along the way, which last year ran from five to eight in the evening with warm drinks and candy for anyone passing through. If you want the season without the costumes, save the cemetery walk for the Wednesday and meet Jane Leroe at the mausoleum instead.
None of it requires leaving town, and none of it requires the bagpiper.
Piedmont holds onto small rhythms like this one, the same blocks lighting up in the same order every year, the same walking group keeping its Wednesday tradition alive decade after decade. It is one of the quieter reasons people who move here tend to stay a long time. If you already know which block is your favorite, or you are still learning the map, Anian Tunney and Adrienne Krumins would love to hear about it. Contact Us.