There's a reason pedestrians keep stopping dead in their tracks on Eighth Avenue near Union Street this week. Charlie Pigott, a 60-year-old local real estate broker, has once again installed a pumpkin so massive it had to be lifted onto his Park Slope brownstone stoop with a forklift, kicking off the tenth year of a Halloween tradition that has turned his front steps into a neighborhood landmark.
This year's pumpkin traveled from a farm in Honesdale, Pennsylvania, according to the New York Post, continuing Pigott's habit of sourcing his showpiece from out-of-state growers rather than anything closer to home. The paper reports the gourd tips the scale at 960 pounds, roughly 100 pounds lighter than last year's pumpkin — a dip Pigott theorizes may trace back to heavy summer rain that stunted this season's crop. Other outlets covering the display this year have pegged the pumpkin's weight at nearly 1,000 pounds, a discrepancy that remains unresolved between accounts.
Getting a pumpkin that large from a flatbed truck to a Brooklyn stoop is no small feat. Pigott again relied on a forklift, a tool he now reaches for whenever a pumpkin is too heavy for the local teenagers he sometimes recruits to help haul the smaller ones. It's become something of a ritual in itself — the heavy machinery pulling up to a tree-lined block of brownstones, drawing out onlookers before the pumpkin even touches the ground.
A Decade of Growing Bigger
The whole thing started small, and accidentally. Per the Post's reporting, Pigott and his daughter Elizabeth began the tradition after spotting a 100-pound pumpkin beside a road in Connecticut and deciding to haul it home and plant it on their stoop. Other outlets describe the origin a bit differently: ABC7 reports that ten years ago, Pigott brought home a 100-pound squash, while Vogue's account has him driving back from his daughter's boarding school in Connecticut when he spotted a huge pumpkin on the roadside that he estimated at about 150 pounds.
Whatever the exact starting point, the scale escalated fast. ABC7 reports the pumpkin grew to 250 pounds the following year and ballooned to 1,000 pounds by year three. By 2022, Patch had documented a roughly 1,000-pound pumpkin arriving on Pigott's stoop via U-Haul, driven up from Pennsylvania by his son George, with a crew of up to ten people spending two hours muscling it into place using furniture dollies and planks of wood. That same report noted the pumpkin the year before had weighed 600 pounds, and that Pigott had by then been bringing oversized pumpkins to his Park Slope home for about eight years running.
Scouting Season Starts in August
The hunt for each year's pumpkin isn't a last-minute errand. According to Vogue, Pigott and his son start thinking about the pumpkin every August, scouting farms across Connecticut, Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Upstate New York before settling on a winner. Vogue reports their criteria are specific: a tall pumpkin with good color, a classic pumpkiny shape and a solid stem — a description that lines up with the Post's account of Pigott selecting for orange color and thick stems to help stave off early rotting.
The scouting process has gotten easier with the pumpkin's growing reputation. Northeastern farms reportedly began reaching out to Pigott with tips on standout finds around 2023, saving him some of the legwork. He's previously put a price on the smaller specimens too, noting that a 100-pound pumpkin runs about $50 — though he's said the real payoff isn't financial, but the joy it brings to the kids and adults who stop by.
More Than Just One Giant Gourd
The big pumpkin doesn't stand alone. Pigott has also scattered additional pumpkins ranging from 2 to 120 pounds, along with hay bales, across his Eighth Avenue property, turning the whole stoop into a seasonal tableau rather than a single photo op. The display draws local children, families and other visitors, some of whom rub the pumpkin for good luck on their way past. Vogue notes that over the years, the pumpkin has become a genuine neighborhood attraction, with all kinds of people stopping to snap its picture — and nearby school teachers have gone so far as to bring classes by on field trips to use the pumpkin as a lesson in how crops grow.
Pigott has said he wants the display to keep growing each year, and his ambitions extend beyond the stoop. He has floated the idea of eventually turning oversized pumpkins into edible boats that neighborhood kids could race in Prospect Park's lake, a project that would push the tradition well past its front-step origins.
As for this year's pumpkin, it isn't going anywhere just yet. Per Vogue, Pigott keeps his display up until right after Thanksgiving, when the pumpkin is composted rather than tossed out — the same fate planned for this year's gourd once the holiday wraps. Pigott has also said he's happy to pass along the pumpkin's seeds to anyone with a green thumb and a yard big enough to handle what might grow.
