On the Sunday morning of Columbus Day weekend, Dempsey Place fills with the kind of noise that only happens once a year in Eastchester. A marching band tunes up near the curb. Fire trucks from the volunteer companies idle in formation. Kids in Little League jackets wait for the signal to fall in line. By noon the parade steps off and heads toward Lake Isle Country Club, where a four-day carnival has already been running since Friday night.
A half mile away, the trail through Twin Lakes County Park is doing what it does every other Sunday of the year. Someone is walking a dog on a leash past the equestrian center. A runner cuts through toward the Hutchinson River Trail. None of it slows down or speeds up because of what's happening at Lake Isle.
That gap is the actual story of Columbus Day weekend here. The town runs two systems on the same four days, one loud and ticketed, one quiet and unpaved, and most residents pick a side without realizing the other one is close enough to fold into the same afternoon.
Fifty Years at Lake Isle
The Eastchester Columbus Day Carnival and Parade isn't a pop-up. It's been running for roughly five decades, and the Town Board treats it that way. Ahead of this year's event, the board approved a full slate of contracts for the weekend, including amusement rides, entertainment bookings, a show-mobile stage rental, and a fireworks display, the kind of civic lift usually reserved for something the town considers part of its identity. Supervisor Colavita summed it up plainly at the meeting, calling it, as reported by Citizen Portal, our famous Columbus Day festival.
Attendance in recent years has run into the tens of thousands over the full weekend, with a dozen food booths anchoring the fairgrounds at Lake Isle. Those crowd figures shift year to year with weather and timing, but the scale has stayed consistent enough that it's become one of the few events where you'll run into people from Pelham and New Rochelle who make the trip specifically for it, not just Eastchester residents circling back to their own town.
One thread runs through the whole thing longer than almost anything else on the schedule. John Degrazio, co-owner of Gigante Bar and Restaurant, has staffed a food and cocktail presence at the carnival for more than a decade running. That's not a vendor rotating through a booking calendar. That's a restaurant that treats the carnival as part of its own yearly rhythm, not a one-off appearance.
The Actual Schedule
The town has locked in the dates for 2026: the carnival runs Friday, October 9 through Monday, October 12 at Lake Isle Country Club, with the parade and a fireworks display both set for Sunday, October 11.
| Day | Date | What Happens |
|---|---|---|
| Friday | Oct. 9 | Carnival opens at Lake Isle Country Club, evening hours |
| Saturday | Oct. 10 | Carnival continues, afternoon into night |
| Sunday | Oct. 11 | Parade assembles on Dempsey Place, steps off at noon, ends at the carnival grounds; fireworks that evening |
| Monday | Oct. 12 | Carnival's final day, shorter afternoon session |
Exact hour-by-hour timing for each day tends to shift slightly year to year and gets posted closer to the event on the carnival's own site. What's fixed is the four-day window, the Sunday parade at noon, and the fireworks that follow it that night, all locked in by the town's own contracts rather than left to a promoter's calendar.
A Half Mile of Quiet
Twin Lakes County Park sits close enough to Lake Isle that you could walk between them, but it runs on a completely separate set of rules. The park spans about 125 acres and is anchored by Twin Lakes Farm, Westchester's largest equestrian center, with more than 100 stalls, two indoor arenas, and four outdoor arenas spread across two campuses. Dogs are welcome on leash. Bikes aren't permitted on most of the trail. None of it is built for crowds, and none of it gets any bigger or smaller because a carnival two minutes away just brought in a fireworks contract.
From Twin Lakes, the trail keeps going. It connects through the old Hutchinson River bridle path into Nature Study Woods in New Rochelle, and from there ties into the broader Colonial Greenway, a fifteen-mile figure-eight trail system that also runs through Saxon Woods Park, Ward Acres Park, and Sheldrake Lake. The full outer loop covers 12.3 miles. The western loop through Twin Lakes alone is 9.4 miles. The Town of Mamaroneck's own description of the greenway notes that it links five municipalities, Eastchester among them, through woods and wetlands that carry history back to Thomas Paine and Anne Hutchinson.
None of that system shows up in any coverage of Columbus Day weekend, because it doesn't need to. It's not an event. It's just there, every weekend, including this one.
Same Weekend, Different Rhythm
The carnival and the greenway aren't competing for the same visit. One is concentrated into a single lot at Lake Isle Country Club for four specific days, built around rides, food booths, and a stage. The other is spread across five towns and runs on no schedule at all. A resident who only goes to the carnival treats Columbus Day weekend as a single afternoon out. A resident who only walks the greenway treats it as an ordinary weekend that happens to have more traffic near White Plains Road.
Treating the two as one plan is the part most people skip. The parade ends around early afternoon on Sunday, which leaves the back half of the day open. Twin Lakes is close enough that a walk toward Nature Study Woods fits comfortably before dinner, and it's the kind of transition that actually uses what the town has, rather than picking one half of the weekend and missing the other.
If You're Actually Going
The parade assembles on Dempsey Place and ends at the carnival grounds, so parking near the assembly point early gets harder to find as the morning goes on. The carnival itself runs at Lake Isle Country Club on White Plains Road, and Sunday, with the parade and fireworks both falling on that day, is by far the busiest of the four.
If you're planning to fold in the trail side of the weekend, Twin Lakes County Park has a small parking area near the equestrian center off California Road, and Nature Study Woods is accessible from Webster Road in New Rochelle if you want to approach from that direction instead. Neither lot is built for carnival-sized crowds, which is exactly why the trail stays quiet even when Lake Isle doesn't.
Fifty years in, the carnival has earned its place as the weekend everyone talks about. The greenway has earned something quieter: a system that keeps working exactly the same way whether thousands show up down the road or nobody does at all. Knowing both are there, half a mile apart, is the difference between visiting Eastchester for a weekend and actually living in it.
If you're weighing what a neighborhood like this actually offers day to day, not just on paper, that's a conversation Chris Tulotta has often. Reach out any time you want a local read on Eastchester that goes beyond the listing sheet.
