It's been a while since I did a halloween set that actually lined up with halloween, so this seemed like too good of an opportunity to pass up! Halloween City was essentially Party City's answer to Spirit Halloween, opening a much smaller number of popup stores each fall, generally near existing Party City locations (there was one out of frame to the left of this picture). This one was in a former Pier 1 that closed with the chain the previous year. I'm not sure how long Halloween City lasted after 2021, when I visited this store, but probably not very long since Party City went out in 2024. This store is now home to Boot Barn, which seems to have changed nothing about Pier 1's facade, not even the blue paint on the gable.
Ha, I think the grey weather and all the grayscale colored cars are adding to the spooky atmosphere! Strangely enough, you'd think this was Tacoma with all the grayscale colored cars being non-Subarus! It isn't too often in the Seattle area that there are two Mitsubishis in the frame and no Subarus! The blue Prius C and the couple of the red cars are the only thing adding any real visual pop to the parking lot.
ReplyDeleteI would say that my new silver car would only contribute to the morose conditions, but at least it is a lighter shade grayscale color! The silver van looks less bad than the other grayscales around it. So, yeah, maybe nobody else will buy my excuse, lol.
I never really thought about it before, but I suppose Michaels is one of those retailers which never bothered to change their signage to reflect their newer logo. I'm not complaining, the old logo is much better, IMO!
Usually Spirit Halloween stores are all over the place and are hard to miss, but I have not seen a single one this year. Vacant retail spots are a bit hard to find in Houston right now...mainly because gyms and children's playground type things have taken over most of the vacant spots! I heard Spirit took over a vacant Luby's Cafeteria somewhere in the Houston area this year. I can't even imagine how that would work!
Welcome to Seattle in fall! It doesn't help that all of the trees had lost their leaves early that year; this year we had a significantly less dry summer than we've had in years, and we've had a lot more fall color with the trees not just drying up and turning brown in late summer like they tend to these days.
DeleteI didn't realize Michaels had a new logo! I guess that shows how much I pay attention to stores like that. I know they sell baking supplies, but if they're anything like Jo-Ann used to be, it's all massively overpriced compared to elsewhere. I don't tend to get into the fancy decorative stuff anyway.
Spirit has tons of stores around here -- there's certainly no shortage of spots for them! Sadly, they're all in rather uninteresting spaces, so I don't think I'm going to be visiting one this year. The one that had been in Southcenter for years (and was in the old Sears last year) moved to one of the generic nearby strip malls like this one.