They went to great heights for this one.
Among the over-the-top creative costumes at the Village Halloween Parade this year will be a nod to old New York — with a group ensemble based on the famed photograph “Lunch atop a Skyscraper.”
Bronx native Christina Simon Ciurdar and her husband, Ben, spared no detail in recreating the 1932 black-and-white shot of ironworkers eating lunch on a beam 850 feet above street level during the construction of Rockefeller Center.
“We’re going to have a newspaper, a lunch box, hold a sandwich, pieces that are similar to the actual photo. And it’s also nice too because the lunchbox doubles as my purse,” Ciurdar, 39, told The Post.
“For the outfit part, I made sure that everybody stayed in the color palette of black, white and gray. So we went to TJ Maxx and just got the largest pairs of pants we could find.”
Five people will make up the costume, including another couple and the womanâs sister. Ciurdar estimates it cost just under $100 per person to make.
She used a foam board to create the backdrop of the cityscape, which they will all be standing behind, and another board to make the sky, which sits behind their upper bodies.
The pants, which are filled with polyfill, are tied to each person’s waist and dangle from the foam beam to give the appearance they are sitting.
“There is wire running through the leg to add a bend and keep the shoes on,” Ciurdar explained.
There will also be a string of Christmas lights under the beam, “to make it look like the windows are twinkling,” she said.
“Because once it gets really dark, it’s hard to tell what anybody is.”
The Ciurdars, who now live in Tampa, Fla., arrived in Queens a week prior to the parade to prep the ambitious creation — which “took three days to construct, plus three days of planning, ordering supplies and running around the city beforehand,” she said.
Ciurdar, a manager at Citi who has always been an artist, and her husband, have been attending the parade since they started dating in 2014.
In the beginning, they did general admission, which is free but means waiting up to three hours to get on the route.
“It just got really hectic, especially because my costumes got bigger and bigger and you’re squeezed in shoulder to shoulder,” she said.
Now, they purchase $125 tickets for the event, which allows participants to skip the line.
“You’re one of the first people released into the parade and you get a staging area,” she said.
“And it’s nice for us too, because our costumes have gotten so elaborate that we bring the pieces on the subway and then we build it on site.”
The iconic 6th Avenue parade, which dates back to 1974, begins at Canal Street and ends at 15th Street, with organizers expecting 80,000 participants and more than 2 million spectators this Halloween.
The couple’s past group costumes included a deck of cards, which Ciurdar created in 2021 — also from scratch.
“That’s hands down my favorite costume,” she said.
“We were on almost every news outlet that year … I love that I got to sew the tangible outfits, but also make the boards. I sewed every single outfit, those are all felt pieces.”
In 2022, her group chose the Wizard of Oz, which proved to be more work than she bargained for.
“That was the year we decided to stop doing characters,” she said.
“I made my entire Glinda outfit. I made all the props for everybody else. So the lion has his courage badge, the tin man has his heart, the witch has her hourglass.”
In 2024, they decided to dress as New York City landmarks — the Empire State Building, Times Square, Statue of Liberty and Yankee Stadium.
“The Yankees had just lost the World Series, the day of the parade. So my friend Scott was getting like so much s–t, people razzing him,” she said, laughing.
Ciurdar, who handpainted each landmark, said that costume took the longest.
“I didn’t realize when you’re painting buildings, you have to be very specific and linear. And then we needed so many colors and there were so many like runs to the store. So that got out of hand quick,” she said.
It typically takes the group an hour and a half to walk the roughly 1.4 miles of the parade route.
“Honestly, we walk really slow too, we usually piss everybody off around us,” Ciurdar said, laughing. “Because we’re like, ‘We took time on these costumes. I want everybody to see them.’”
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