The latest indie venture to open in the Lloyd Center mall is the Halloween Cultural Preservation Museum, a pop-up exhibit of Halloween nostalgia inside the former Spencer’s store.
Behind a small Halloween-themed retail space, the museum features displays of vintage decorations that chart the history of Halloween commercialism from the 1920s through the 1990s.
The project is the creation of Kylie Jackson and Fernando Irizarry, who wanted to give the average Halloween fan a chance to see rare pieces usually found only in private collections.
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“Halloween’s been an obsession of mine since I was a kid,” Irizarry said. “I’ve been collecting things here and there my whole life, and I got really serious about it the past few years.”
Vintage Halloween has become a hot collectible, “and unless you have $200 to blow on a piece of plastic, most people don’t have access to all this stuff,” Irizarry said. “We wanted to make it accessible to the public so people of all ages can experience it.”
Jackson found an affordable space for their project in Lloyd Center, which has developed a niche offering affordable leases to independent stores and art experiences. The museum is on the mall’s second floor, next to Gambit’s Games & Anime, Floating World Comics and Brickdiculous Lego store.
“My degree is in design with an emphasis in exhibition design, so I really like making immersive spaces,” Jackson said.
All of the decorations are dated and labeled, offering a history of Halloween through the decades. Jackson has also created a space that replicates a 1980s living room, where old Halloween commercials play on a tiny, cathode ray tube TV.
Many of the paper decorations were created by the Beistle Company, whose inexpensive line of Halloween-themed paper products in the 1920s helped popularize Halloween decoration in the United States. There’s also a collection of plastic candy pails and blow molds, first popularized in the 1960s.
“These are, to me, works of art that people have put their creativity and their soul into,” Irizarry said. “The plastic decorations from the ‘50s and ‘60s and onward, they just ooze Halloween spirit, and the warm glow that emanates from them just warms my heart.”
The museum opened Oct. 20 and has drawn Halloween lovers, along with a few confused, would-be Spencer’s shoppers.
“There’s a surprising amount of people that are visibly disappointed it’s not a Spencers anymore,” Irizarry said.
Admission is $8 for adults, $7 for seniors, and $5 for children 12 and younger. Entry for everyone is $5 on Tuesdays, which includes Halloween.
The museum is open noon to 7 p.m. daily through October, and will continue with more limited hours through November. The long-term goal, its creators said, is to create a year-round museum.
— Samantha Swindler, sswindler@oregonian.com, @editorswindler
