Visitors will be required to have tickets on those nights, which must be purchased online, in advance. This year, to combat the crowds and long wait times, the zoo is shifting to a timed entry system on Friday, Saturday and Sunday nights. Last year’s show drew a record number of visitors, snarling traffic for miles on several of the weekends. We want to make each year better than the last and really ‘wow’ people each year.” “We are already thinking of themes for next year.
“Lack of sleep we don’t sleep much,” she laughed, and then said that coming up with innovative ideas each year is another. John and Kimberly Reckner also carve pumpkins for the show and, according to the younger Reckner, creating works of art on the surface of a pumpkin is just one of the challenges of the job. Once completed, they are loaded onto a truck and driven to the zoo where they are given the finishing touches, illuminated and placed in their respective skits. “I’m hoping it’ll go the distance, but we’ll see.” Though it probably won’t last more than a couple of weeks, Germain is keeping her fingers crossed.
One of her current designs is a remarkably detailed rendering of a waterfall, replicated from a photograph, which has taken her nearly three days to finish. “It’s a full-time job,” said Simone Germain, a pumpkin artist who has been creating masterpieces for the Spectacular for the past seven years and who will likely complete at least 50 pumpkins for this years festival. Working around the clock, they come and go at all hours of the day and night and spend hours, sometimes days, on a single pumpkin only to repeat the process three or more times for each design. Many of them are sourced from farms in Connecticut and are subsequently used for compost when the show is over.Ī small army of people spends up to six weeks preparing and carving the pumpkins, including 20 artists who work out of a studio in Oxford, creating the specialized pumpkins that John Reckner refers to as “intricates.” The Laughing Tree, one of the show’s signature attractions, requires at least three days and a boom lift to help place the scores of pumpkins that trim the sprawling tree.Īnd while the event boasts more than 5,000 displayed pumpkins throughout the show’s five-week run, more than 20,000 will be used as the gourds last only about a week before beginning to decompose, requiring they be replaced with new pumpkins with freshly carved designs. The jack-o’-lanterns are all wired with LED lights, requiring nearly five miles of electrical cords to illuminate them all and a week’s worth of work to run. Putting it all together is no small feat. Past themes have focused on the alphabet, the 50 states, and “The People’s Choice.” This year’s is “American Treasures,” featuring commemorative stamp art, humanitarian heroes, endangered species and cultural icons. And because each show is centered around a specific theme, with multiple “skits,” or motifs, the pumpkins along with their accompanying music must be coordinated well in advance. The Jack-O-Lantern Spectacular event at the Roger Williams Park Zoo adopts a theme each year, this one being “American Treasures,” featuring commemorative stamp art, heroes, endangered species and cultural icons.ĭrawing more than 125,000 visitors annually, the Jack-O-Lantern Spectacular requires months of planning, often beginning before the current season ends. “It’s all year, every day, spent thinking about pumpkins,” said Kimberly Reckner. With each passing year its popularity grew until it eventually ended up at the zoo, where it’s been hosted, minus a five-year break from 2004-09, since 2001.įor Reckner, daughter Kimberly, and son Travis, who runs a Spectacular in Louisville, Ky., it’s become much more than just a jack-o’-lantern display, it’s their lives. It was so successful that after a couple of years the event was moved to a nearby park in order to accommodate the increasing crowds. With the help of family and friends, he put on his first jack-o’-lantern display in 1988 at the local elementary school. Months later Reckner was still talking about it and decided to create his own display in his home town of Oxford, Mass. “So we went up there, it was a beautiful landscape and it made an impression on me, in addition to the 500 jack-o’-lanterns that were on the mountain.” “I had read about a mountainside display in northern Vermont when my kids were young,” explained founder John Reckner.
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