A month of events
AddamsFest’s 2026 program in Westfield includes an art exhibit, a music and beer festival, a masquerade ball, and a competition for the town’s spookiest front lawn. The festival schedule also lists lantern tours at the cemetery, a walking tour following Charles Addams’s route from home to school and downtown, and a free outdoor screening of the 1991 film The Addams Family at Foundation Park, according to the festival’s schedule.
Artwork kept in Westfield
A life-size skeleton drawing Addams made as a teenager is among the works connected to the town’s celebration. New Jersey Monthly reports that the drawing was made on a barn wall and that the section bearing it was removed and put on public display in 2018. The account is based on the magazine’s reporting: New Jersey Monthly.
A historic Westfield theater hosts an exhibit of Addams’s work on loan from his family foundation, alongside work by local artists, the Associated Press reported.
Addams and his hometown
Addams was born in 1912 and grew up in Westfield, where the Victorian homes and other local surroundings informed his best-known creation, according to MyCentralJersey. A Gothic Revival house on Elm Street helped inspire the fictional family home, New Jersey Monthly reports; the town center pond also has a miniature version of that mansion, according to the Associated Press.
Addams spent most of his career as a cartoonist for The New Yorker, which published his first Addams Family cartoon in 1938. He died in New York in 1988, at age 76, the Associated Press reported.
