Westfield Honors 'Addams Family' Creator With Monthlong Festival

Westfield, New Jersey, is marking its ninth annual AddamsFest this October, a monthlong slate of events built around the hometown of cartoonist Charles Addams, who created The Addams Family. Storefront windows along the downtown have been painted with scenes of Gomez, Morticia, Wednesday, Pugsley and other members of the family. Scheduled programming includes an art exhibit, a music and beer festival, a masquerade ball, and a contest among homeowners for the spookiest front lawn display.

Addams drew on the Victorian-era houses, the colonial-era cemetery and other landmarks of Westfield, where he grew up, to shape the look of his work. The town sits about 25 miles southwest of Manhattan. A self-guided heritage trail covers sites connected to his art, including his colonial-style childhood home, where a marker notes that his grandmother lived in the attic and is believed to be the inspiration for the fictional Grandmama Addams. A Victorian house near the route he walked to school to is cited as a partial model for the family's fictional mansion, and a miniature of that mansion sits in a pond in the town center. An old cemetery with tombstones dating to colonial times sits beside a white steeple church; officials say a young Addams visited it often.

AddamsFest began in 2018, when the former mayor wanted a celebration unique to Westfield. Dawn Mackey, a former town councilor who helped found the festival, said there was pushback at first. "A lot of people didn't even know he was from here," she said. Mackey said she knew the idea had landed when a visiting family laid out its Halloween itinerary for her: Salem, Massachusetts; Sleepy Hollow, New York; and Westfield. "I felt like that was the moment," she said. Mackey said the timing was coincidental. The festival started the year before the animated Addams Family movie arrived in 2019, followed by a sequel in 2021, and the Netflix series "Wednesday" brought in more viewers to the family's story.

Residents have taken to the season. "Everyone really gets into it," said Kelly Heuschkel, whose daughter is dressing as Wednesday Addams for Halloween. "I think people decorate more for Halloween here than they do for Christmas." Visitors have also stopped to look at the town. Joy Fox, a Cleveland, Ohio, resident, passed Addams' childhood home on a recent afternoon and said, "It looks like a very nice suburb. I grew up watching the 'Addams Family.'"

The Addams art exhibit runs at a historic movie theater with an old-time marquee, showing work on loan from his family's foundation along with pieces by local artists. A barn wall section cut out and preserved displays a life-size skeleton drawing Addams made when he was young. "The entire barn was graffitied except for this piece," Mackey said. "It was as if decade after decade, teenagers who hung out in this barn still had a reverence, even though they didn't know who drew this."

Addams spent most of his career drawing for The New Yorker, which published his first Addams Family cartoon in 1938. He died in New York in 1988 at 76. Mackey said he was ahead of his time in drawing female lead characters and families that stand apart. One exhibit piece shows Wednesday and Pugsley beside the fireplace on Christmas, building a fire to catch St. Nick as he comes down the chimney. "Every wholesome town has secrets and a dark side. I think he saw that," Mackey said. "To take the darkest parts of people and put a spin on it, that makes it funny instead of terrifying, and that's what he did best."

AddamsFest runs through the end of October, with the homeowner lawn contest and other events scheduled in the days ahead.