On the morning of Saturday, October 10, 2026, a stretch of Queens shoreline that looks out across the water toward the towers of the Throgs Neck Bridge will fill up with dogs in costume. The Little Bay Park Halloween Pooch Parade begins at 11:00 a.m. at the park's Utopia Parkway entrance, where owners and their pets will gather before marching along the waterfront path and finishing on the lawn by the Little Bay parking lot. It runs until 12:30 p.m., it is free, and there is no ticket to buy or list to sign.
The event is billed as the park's first annual pooch Halloween parade. It now has a date on the citywide Halloween calendar maintained by NYC Parks, listed alongside other seasonal events around the city.
What makes the parade more than a cute photo opportunity is the ground it covers. Little Bay Park occupies a little over 55 acres between the Cross Island Parkway and Utopia Parkway, with a third boundary that is simply beachfront. The city acquired the property by condemnation in September 1950, intending to develop the shoreline. Then the Throgs Neck Bridge went up, and the fiscal crisis of the 1970s drained the money away, and the grand plan died. The land sat largely as it was. Known originally as Clearview Park, it was renamed Little Bay Park in 1973.
The name reaches further back than the park. The Mantinecock tribe inhabited the shores of Little Bay before European settlement. In 1644, King Charles I granted 16,000 acres to William Lawrence, a countryman of his, and that grant -- which took in what is now Bayside -- pulled settlers into the area. By 1683, when the Crown carved the New York colony into ten counties, the land had become part of Queens County, which then covered both present-day Queens and Nassau.
For most of the twentieth century, though, the park's most devoted constituency was not historians. It was dog owners. A dog area operated as a pilot program at Little Bay until 2006, when Community Board 7 voted in favor of building something permanent. In December 2010, Parks Commissioner Adrian Benepe stood with State Senator-elect Tony Avella, Council Member Daniel Halloran, Community Board 7 parks committee chair Kim Ohanian, and Miguel Chavez, president of the Freedom Run Association, to cut the ribbon on a new run built with $500,000 in City Council funding. It came with a four-foot chain-link perimeter fence, a stone screen surface, an under-drainage system, a separate section for smaller dogs, a drinking fountain, benches, and plantings for shade. An asphalt path connected it to the waterfront path and to Utopia Parkway.
Benepe's remarks at that ribbon-cutting have aged well as a description of what this parade is actually for. "Dog runs are a great place to meet your neighbors and for your canines to make friends," he said, before thanking Avella for the allocation and adding, on behalf of the city's furry residents, "yip, yip, hooray." At the time there were 27 dog runs in Queens and more than 100 citywide. The park's bike path had just been widened, and $3.8 million in further improvements were planned to expand the parking lot and add a comfort station.
The park has hosted big crowds before. In September 2006 it held its first Back to School Festival, and more than 1,000 children and families turned out for games, rides, face painting, free notebooks and crayons from the Queens Coalition for Parks, and a live turtle brought by the Alley Pond Environmental Center. A Halloween dog parade is a different kind of gathering -- smaller, stranger, and entirely dependent on the willingness of Queens residents to dress their pets as pumpkins, hot dogs, or worse.
That willingness is the whole premise. The route is short, the timing is early, and the reward is mostly the sight of it: a line of costumed animals moving along a path with the water on one side and the bridge overhead, on a piece of coastline that city planners once meant to fill with something else. The parade starts at the Utopia Parkway entrance at 11:00 a.m. and ends on the lawn by the Little Bay parking lot. Bring the pet. The costume is on you.