The trick? Going vertical for treats

The trick or treating usually begins on the 37th floor. The Callahan kids -- Bobby Jr., Emma and Katharine -- elevator to the top of a Manhattan apartment building and then spiral their way down the narrow emergency staircase, stopping at every floor for candy. They bring in quite a haul.

In the week before Halloween, a sign-up sheet is always posted at the building’s elevator banks for the tenants who plan to hand out treats. This way, the kids don’t waste time ringing doorbells at the apartments of workaholics or singles who’d rather make the 3rd Avenue bar scene than make nice with the neighbors’ kids.

But with 37 floors, four apartments to a floor, well, you do the math. Nancy Callahan usually lugs along extra bags because her children’s original sacks often get too heavy with sweets by the 15th floor.

“The whole thing is more intense than anything I remember from my childhood,” says Callahan, who is 44 and grew up in the kinder-and-gentler Virginia suburbs. “My kids go so fast from apartment to apartment and the stairs spiral so much, I sometimes get dizzy trying to keep up with them.”

That’s Halloween in New York -- celebrated the way it is everywhere else, except it’s not.

While the rest of America is preparing for a Halloween that can involve neat rows of suburban houses generous with candy, and parents hanging back as their children trip over their costumes scampering across lawns, New York is not. In Los Angeles, the weather inevitably is balmy; in New England, the holiday inevitably requires annoying overcoats.

In this city, none of that matters. Here, it’s all about going vertical -- and posses of children stampeding down stairwells until they arrive at the super’s apartment in the basement.

Emma Callahan, who is 10, started gaming her Halloween strategy in early October. She weighed the options: Attend a party in a classmate’s building lobby? Drive out to a New Jersey suburb to trick or treat with cousins? Or walk around the corner to a friend’s 37-story building?

Just as parents in Los Angeles drive 15 miles to more bountiful neighborhoods to take their kids trick or treating, Emma and her family, who live in their own townhouse on the Upper East Side, attach themselves to friends who live in a high rise.

“I like the tallest buildings,” says Emma. “There are a whole lot of people so you get a whole lot of candy. The more candy the better.”

Long past the princess stage, Emma has decided this year not only to go vertical again but to go a little creepy. After perusing the goods at a big Halloween party store in the Bronx, Emma settled on a vampire costume. (Of course, the store had run out of witches and warlocks by the second week in October.)

To individualize, Emma also bought a set of fanged teeth and plenty of makeup. It’s pretty hard to imagine how anyone could make this freckled face scary, but Emma is determined to look imposing at the school Halloween carnival Friday.

“I walk to school, so I probably won’t wear the teeth on the street,” she says. “But I’m gonna look scary once I get there.”

Yes, this is New York,where the streets can be scary enough on a normal day, never mind on Halloween. The Callahan children, however, rarely worry about walking their neighborhood. There are precarious blocks in the East 80s and tricky intersections, but mostly it feels safe.

Their school, St. Ignatius Loyola, is four blocks from their house, and the kids go there and to the corner store and local pizzeria on their own. Their parents have instructed them about how to be cautious. So Bobby Jr., who is 12, thinks nothing of dropping off his pants at the dry cleaner on their block. Emma and her 8-year-old sister, Katharine, bop home in their powder-blue jumpers together and then play for a bit, unattended, on the stoop of the family’s old townhouse.

They witness many things as they play -- dogs growling at each other as they relieve themselves on the street, jackhammers rattling the sidewalks, construction workers arguing over a parking space. There’s an armor the city makes them wear. Still, they have that funny way that New York kids do, of remaining innocent yet still savvy.

“I’m not sure I’ll ever be a real New Yorker,” says Nancy Callahan, an insurance executive. “But this is their home, the only one they’ve ever known. They’re exposed to a variety of life, but most of that is for the better.”

When Robert and Nancy Callahan bought the old townhouse 10 years ago, it was what the real estate agents like to call “a classic wreck.” But the Callahans were sure they wanted to raise a family in a “house,” not an apartment, so they fixed up the place and continue to see it “as a work in progress.”

Last spring they tiled over a minuscule outdoor space on the ground floor behind the kitchen. They painted a dreamy Mediterranean seascape on the back wall and put up a basketball hoop. Now Robert Callahan, a consultant who works out of a home office, can shout at his kids “to go play outside,” the way his parents used to tell him when he got underfoot, and he’s sure they will be safe.

These kids will never know from cul-de-sacs and driveways. But at least they have their own “backyard.”

New York always challenges parents to make this adult theme park a place for a family, to make space not only for cars and cookbook collections, but also for a child’s innocence. Halloween is a perfect example. After all, what is supposed to be a children’s holiday is best known in this city for a raucous if not bizarre parade of nearly 20,000 people in Greenwich Village. Under no circumstances could it be called child-friendly.

Most apartment buildings, however, eager to provide the standard goblins-and-gourds experience, do up their lobbies and organize elaborate parties before the kids go trick or treating. This year, a co-op board in Chelsea is trucking in bales of hay and installing cobwebs and a smoke machine to get the kids psyched.

In the fanciest New York apartment buildings, it’s just what you would expect: over the top. The Apthorp, for example, a full-block limestone apartment building erected in 1908 on the Upper West Side, has a Halloween soiree in its gardened courtyard complete with fantastic decorations, live music and a catered dinner and drinks for the adults. Last year someone gave out huge sacks of pennies to the kids that filled four UNICEF boxes. (Only in New York, kids.)

That said, many New York kids aren’t so fortunate. They don’t have friends in high places. So those who live in two- and three-story apartment buildings or attached houses in Brooklyn and Queens are left to work the storefronts. Just like in proprietors in suburban malls, shopkeepers on the Grand Concourse in the Bronx, on Kissena Boulevard in Queens and up and down Manhattan’s Broadway make it a habit to pass out pennies and candy to the kids.

Emma says she loves this Halloween tradition for the serendipity.

Last year on their way up 3rd Avenue, the girl and her siblings, all in costume, stopped at a few stores including a Supercuts salon in the lobby of that 37-story building.

“Just as we got there, they ran out of candy, soooo,” Emma pauses gleefully, “they gave us hair dye instead!”