Haunted hotel and macabre museum welcome kids on 45th Street

On 45th Street between Fourth and Fifth Avenues, Halloween has become a kind of neighborhood theater. Two families living across from each other turned their front yards into immersive worlds that lit up the block on Oct. 31.

On one side of the street, Manny and Lisa Cortez ran “The Bones Hotel,” a skeleton-themed display that filled their stoop and front yard with animatronic figures, fog, colored lights, and a wedding ceremony of the dead. There was a manager, a receptionist, a maid, a bellboy, a priest, even a ring bearer. An animatronic witch that Manny is half-convinced is really haunted, complete with her bubbling brew, topped off the scene.

Manny has been building his Halloween setups ever since he and Lisa moved into the house 10 years ago. Each fall, they start around the middle of October, unpacking boxes of figures and decorations stored in their bedroom because there’s no other place to keep them. “If I had more room,” Manny said, “I’d do Christmas and Easter too.”

Every year he adds something new, determined to make the show better than the last. “You got to step it up,” he said. “Every year we buy stuff and add to it.”

Manny’s brother Mike came from Staten Island to help out, lending an extra hand for wiring, lighting, and crowd control. Mike also works Halloween events at the Staten Island Zoo’s “Spooky Spectacular,” where he sometimes performs as a zombie or hides among animatronics to startle guests. “I walk with a limp anyway,” he joked, “so it makes my job a lot easier.”

This year Lisa dressed as the Black Widow while Manny played Dracula. Even the landlord’s dog got a matching outfit. “We try to match it up,” Manny said.

Directly across the street, Patria and Eliseo Estrada and their daughter Melanie transformed their own front yard into something equally ambitious but entirely different: a miniature museum. Their theme this year was “Night at the Museum,” complete with detailed handmade replicas of artifacts and signs explaining the histories behind them. Visitors could wander through displays of ancient Egypt, Mesoamerica, Asia, Mesopotamia, Europe, and the Arawak culture of the Caribbean. Fossils, dinosaurs, sarcophagi, and Grecian jewelry shared space with carved masks and hand-painted maps. In addition to the realistic replicas, the museum also included Halloween versions of famous artwork, like Van Ghost’s “Scary Night.”

The Estrada family, Eliseo, Melanie, Patria, and her sister Daisy Avilez, stand in front of their “Night at the Museum” decorations.

The Estradas have been doing themed displays for four years, each one more elaborate than the last. Their first was inspired by Día de Muertos, followed by a pirate adventure and a “Bone Appetit” haunted restaurant filled with creepy dishes made of worms and fake maggots. Patria says they work on the installations all year, little by little. Her husband Eliseo salvages materials through his sanitation job and the family turns them into props. “When you do it from the heart,” Patria said, “it’s worth the effort.”

Patria spent decades as a computer programmer, but she sees the Halloween builds as her real creative outlet. “I always wanted to be an actress, to work in theater,” she said. “I never had the opportunity. This is a way of me expressing my skills, my daughter’s skills, my husband’s skills.” Next year’s theme will be Star Wars.

On Halloween night, the two houses glowed in contrast, the Estradas’ museum of civilizations facing Manny and Lisa Cortez’s gothic hotel of bones. For a few hours, 45th Street became a spooky stage, a reminder that creativity here doesn’t need a gallery or a grant, just a front yard, some imagination, and a few helping hands.