Then, a few years later, his son, George, ordered pumpkins in Pennsylvania. Upon arriving at the farm, he discovered they had cracked. But there was an alternative. He sent Pigott a picture of what he called a “really, really big pumpkin,” but there was nothing for scale in the photo. “I said, ‘Bring it to Brooklyn,’” Pigott recalls. It turned out to be roughly 800 or 900 pounds.
When Pigott opened up the back of the U-Haul truck, he was flabbergasted. “I was like, oh my God, look at this thing!” he recalls. They got about 10 people from the neighborhood together and hoisted it onto the stoop. “Everybody really, really loved it,” he says. “And after we went big, there was no going back.”
Every year, Pigott and his son start thinking about the pumpkin in August, scouting farms in Connecticut, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Upstate New York. Their criteria: a tall pumpkin with good color, classic pumpkiny shape, and a solid stem. (“It’s very important to me to have a nice stem,” he says.) This year, the role went to a nearly thousand-pound pick from Honesdale, Pennsylvania, which Pigott got onto the stoop with a forklift.
“It’s very minimalist,” Pigott says of his overall stoop decor. “And what’s great about the pumpkin is: Who could dislike the pumpkin?” He adds that it’s “more of a harvest, fall, autumn Thanksgiving kind of approach than a Halloween approach.” He keeps it up until right after Thanksgiving.
Over the years, Pigott’s pumpkin has become a genuine neighborhood attraction, with all kinds of people coming by to take its picture. For Pigott, the tradition is all about gratitude. “It’s about giving back to the community that’s given so much to me,” he says. “I just want to bring joy to my neighborhood that’s reared me, reared my kids, reared my parents, and now my grandchildren.”
