Crazy Hat Day: The Tribeca Camp Tradition of Exotic Headwear

Three Downtown Day Camp Crazy Hatters, from left: Robert Laird, 6; Natalie D'Abreo, 8; and Thomas Rowbottom, 6. Photos: Carl Glassman/Tribeca Trib

How silly can kids get?

Judging from what sprung from the heads of Downtown Day Campers last week at Crazy Hat Day—very silly.

One after another, the young campers entered the schoolyard at Tribeca's P.S. 234, heads festooned with feathers and wands, balloons and cotton balls and cardboard constructions with mysterious protuberances.

Hannah O'Brien, 5, was sporting a bevy of pipe cleaners tucked into a crown made of tin foil. On the crown, she had written 'Crazy Hat Day" upside down. Her father, Mike, explained that she had insisted the letters be upside down because "it was crazy."

Perched on eight-year-old Natalie D'Abreo's head was another elaborate creation—an octopus atop a glittering baseball cap with cascading paper streamers ("it's seaweed," she explained) and feathers around the mollusk's eye ("the eyelashes," of course). "It only took five minutes," she said. To which her mother who had helped her along with her younger sister, gently corrected her. "Sixty minutes," she said.

Like all artists, many of the hat designers couldn't explain the source of their inspiration. That was the case with Teddy Kos, 8, whose head gear was especially eye-catching. Completely covering his hair was half of a soccer ball camouflaged by a thick carpet of painted cotton balls. Kos proudly pointed out the chin strap that was keeping the piece tightly tied to his head. Asked where he got the idea for the creation, he said he "didn't know," and then, with cotton balls bobbing, he hurried to catch up with his camp group.

This was the 20th anniversary of  the camp's Crazy Hat Day and director Russ Schulman, who was wearing a turban fastened with a large jeweled broach, said that kids liked the event because "it was a way to express themselves and be creative."

Assistant director Stacy Wender elaborated on the day's appeal.

It's a way for the kids to pretend to be someone else, she noted. "If they wear a police hat, they feel like they're the police, if they wear a  tiara, they feel like a princess. It's magical."