Check it out—three Horror Street entries in the same month! Well, with Halloween just a week away, and things like the Spirit Halloween Subway in town for the Spooky Season, the timing seems perfect for my latest NYC discovery, even if it doesn’t involve street art.

This week, my wanderings took me north along Manhattan’s prestigious Park Avenue, home to the headquarters of megacorporations and the apartments/condos/town houses of the ultrarich. And it was while I was waiting for a red crosswalk signal to change on a corner in the East 60s that a flash of red caught the corner of my eye. I looked toward one of the pedestrian islands that run along the center of Park Avenue and saw…

Well, now. Looks like someone’s a long way from Derry, Maine…

In case you’re not in the know, Derry is the fictional stalking ground of Pennywise, the evil, murderous clown who inhabits the town’s sewer system in the pages of Stephen King’s classic novel It, and later portrayed by Tim Curry and Bill Skarsgard on film and TV.

Has Pennywise grown tired of Derry? Has he set up house in Midtown Manhattan? Can he even afford the rents in New York—I mean, what does sewer space go for these days on Park Avenue?

Or maybe it’s just a very sly, very low-key way of promoting the clown’s upcoming TV series, It: Welcome to Derry, which premieres on HBO Max this Sunday?

Whatever the red balloon represents, it might be best to just avoid the area’s sewer gratings for a little while—unless, that is, you’re curious to discover if you can float down there…

Stay tuned for further installments of Horror Street—there’s plenty of macabre graffiti art to be found on the streets of New York, if you look in the right creepy places! And be sure to check out my previous HS entries: the Brooklyn Vampire, the demonic D-Rod, Where the Gene Wilder Things Are, the beast called Queens’thluhu, the scarifying Ghoulmobile, the regal Griffin, the Spooky Forest, and Beetlejuice himself!

(Photo © Steven A. Roman)