A popular Halloween parade that attracts close to 400 children and several hundred onlookers to Portland’s West End neighborhood each October has been saved.

The Shoestring Theater, which has organized the parade for the past 30 years, announced this month the parade had gotten too big and unwieldy to safely manage. Nance Parker, Shoestring’s director, said the parade would have to be canceled.

But Wynne Wirth, a West End resident, and Portland City Councilor David Marshall joined forces and pledged to bring the parade back.

On Wednesday, they met with city officials and police, applied for an event permit, arranged for a police escort and are planning for the parade to take place Friday night, Oct. 31. The parade route, which will start at the Reiche School playground, has been shortened and more volunteers will be recruited to ensure that children and onlookers are kept safe.

Marshall said the parade, which starts at 6:15 p.m., will feature a circus-trained stilt walker, belly dancers, a live band and lots of children dressed in Halloween costumes.

Wirth, who has two children enrolled at Reiche School, said the news that the parade had been canceled was upsetting to parents and children.

“I’m not really re-inventing the wheel,” she said. “We’re just picking up the strings, the shoestrings as I like to say.”

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