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- Subscribe - Contact Us - Rate Card - Place an Ad Archives Revels Classifieds Real Estate Menu Guide Wedding Weather Subscribe Contact Us September 17, 2005 The rise and fall of Halloween celebrations in Ashland By Jennifer Squires Ashland Daily Tidings Unruly celebrants turned the fountain in front of the Chamber of Plaza into a boiling cauldron of bubbles in 1990. File photo | Ashland Daily Tidings The beginnings of Ashland’s Halloween street party can be credited or blamed on several sources. It’s difficult to pinpoint when the whole thing started and why. Old newspaper clippings and police accounts call it a celebration of the closing of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, adults enjoying a slice of their childhood, the chamber of commerce supporting a free bus shuttle service and the city closing down streets in the business district. “Ashland’s always looking for a party. Any excuse and you got a couple hundred people,” said longtime Ashland resident Lance Pugh. “If you’ve got a couple hundred people and the city sanctions it, you’ve got a couple thousand people because nobody wants to be left out. ... It was building up over the years.” Police reported “isolated drinking incidents and vandalism to property” in the 1970s, but the accounts of boisterous crowds taking over the downtown area that clung to future Halloweens are nonexistent. By the early 1980s, costumed people started coming downtown to bars, and taverns opened for costume parties. The influx of people inspired city officials to cordon off the business district — East Main Street from the Plaza to Third Street — for pedestrian safety, according to Daily Tidings articles from the era. Pugh remembers the holiday as “fun and joyful.” He estimates about 5,000 people took to the streets in 1985. That year, a band played on East Main Street and things got a little wild — revelers threw M-80 fireworks into the crowd and police received complaints of drinking and drug use in public, according to APD files — but people had a good time. A freelance writer, Pugh penned an article about the festivities that ran in an airline magazine during the summer of ’86. Stories about the chamber-sponsored, city-sanctioned street party popped up in other publications and, in one year, the crowd mushroomed to more than 10,000. ‘To hell in a hand basket’ That was 1986. By many accounts, that’s when the fun got out of control. Again, live music filled the downtown and the streets were closed. The city provided portable toilets and trash bins, food vendors set up on sidewalks and a free bus service drove partygoers around Ashland all night. The police department, under the direction of then-chief Vic Lively, came to the Plaza in costume to contain the large crowds but “not spoil everyone’s fun,” according to a history of Halloween put together by APD deputy chief Rich Walsh, who was in costume and on duty that night. The lack of police presence and the sheer volume of people downtown was a dangerous mixture. In Lithia Park, one man was stabbed in the stomach. A man dressed as a cowboy shot another reveler in the foot when he tried to snuff out a lit cigarette on the floor of a tavern. “Roving gangs with clubs and sticks milled through the crowds,” Walsh wrote in his history. The gangs, Pugh remembers, were largely composed of high school football players from Klamath Falls who stopped in Ashland after getting pounded by North Medford High. Two football players — probably linemen, Pugh estimated — who were dressed in fatigues decked an APD officer in a ballerina costume. The officer was unconscious before he hit the ground. When a second officer, this one dressed as a gorilla, tried to control the situation, he was hit in the face as well. “It was a weird deal,” Pugh said. “Everything went to hell in a hand basket mainly because our police department wasn’t in uniform.” There were more than 40 fistfights that night, Walsh recalled. People carried weapons and officers spent most of the night trying to arrest people. “There was no way to quell the riot,” Pugh said. “If you had five policemen with the badges and hats out there, these high school kids would have turned away.” Putting a lid on it After Halloween ’86 the chamber ended its sponsorship of the street party and the city stopped official support, although street closures downtown and the supply of portable toilets continued through the end of the decade. Police wore uniforms and worked the crowd in pairs. In 1987, at least 39 arrests were made and dozens of fights were broken up. The next year, 90 people were arrested and someone lit an explosive device in a portable toilet. People with pistols, rifles, bats, double-bladed axes, swords, chains and knives were seen in the crowd in 1989. That year, revelers threw rocks at police cars and a city street-sweeper. A contingent of Oregon State troopers were dispatched to Ashland and helped arrest 96 people, including one person who had 400 hits of LSD. By 1990, APD officials coordinated assistance from other departments to control the crowds. Halloween was windy and rainy that year, which kept some people away. Through most of the next decade, cold and stormy weather quieted the rancorous street party. In newspaper clippings, people’s memories and even APD crime statistics, few accounts of the festivities can be found. But in the late 1990s, something rejuvenated the holiday in Ashland. “I would breathe a sigh of relief every time we made it through Halloween without a major catastrophe,” Walsh wrote in his report, adding the revelry started to resemble what he remembered from his first years on the job in the ’80s. In 2004, a minor stabbing, vandalism, gang activity and a near-riot kept police busy past 3 a.m., according to police accounts. Between 6 p.m. on Halloween and 8 a.m. the next morning, 40 people were arrested, cited, taken to the Medford detoxification center or warned and taken home. “Alcohol was everywhere and our officers did the best they could to catch violators and dispose of their contraband,” APD Sgt. Bob Smith wrote in a Nov. 2004 inter-departmental e-mail. “We ran from fight, to fight, to fight.” Walsh estimated the crowd, a large portion of which was from out of town, at 3,000 people — a far cry from the 10,000 partygoers in the ’80s. “It doesn’t feel the same at all,” Pugh said, remembering back to the shuttle bus service, costume parties and sophisticated costumes that made the festivities famous. “It was a real treat to be able to get on a bus and be driven across town and meet a whole different group of people. ... Every place was a party. Every place that had a liquor license was a party.” Staff writer Jennifer Squires can be reached at 482-3456 x 3019 or [email protected]. 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