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Shopping Centers Today -> February 2004
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REMEMBERING WHEN FAO SCHWARZ WAS KID HEAVEN
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Photo: The Associated Press |
| They weren’t kidding. FAO Inc. announced the day after Christmas it had a buyer for FAO Schwarz’s flagships in New York City and Las Vegas. |
“I always wanted to visit,” he said of the legendary emporium. He bought a special deck of cards for a French game he’d played as a child. “You couldn’t get them anywhere else,” he said.
When Laurie Chang was growing up in New York, she says her family shopped for toys at variety stores and at a specialty store on Canal Street in Chinatown.
“I had the image that the rich and famous go [to FAO] to buy toys,” recalls the 40-something insurance administrator. “It was not for your everyday person.”
Later, as an adult, she came to enjoy walking the aisles at FAO Schwarz and fantasizing about the toys, making up for lost time, as it were.
“The experience was just awesome — the size and all the toys you can think of,” she said. “The most impressive thing was the stuffed animals 7 feet tall.”
The magic was still there in 1988 when the store co-starred with Tom Hanks in the film Big, about a boy inhabiting a man’s body who goes to work for a toy manufacturer.
FAO Inc., parent company of the FAO Schwarz toy stores, succeeded at first when it tried to bring the wonder of its New York institution to other cities. Twelve-year-old Chicagoan Morgan McKinley — this writer’s son — fondly recalls visiting the now defunct FAO Schwarz store on Michigan Avenue. He reminisces about shiny escalators, a Star Wars Battle Unit as high as the ceilings of most houses, 6-foot-tall Lego figures, huge stuffed animals and an awesome array of all the newest toys.
The Michigan Avenue store offered “everything you could possibly want as a kid,” Morgan says. “It was much, much better than Toys ‘R’ Us — it was a real toy store. At Toys ‘R’ Us everything’s in the box, and you don’t get to see what it’s like. Toys ‘R’ Us is just a regular building. Nothing’s done to make it look good.”
Morgan says he was disappointed to learn that the Michigan Avenue store had been closed. This Christmas season he visited the FAO Schwarz department in the Carson Pirie Scott department store on Chicago’s State Street and pronounced himself unimpressed.
And he seemed vaguely offended when he discovered that the FAO Schweetz, an offshoot of FAO Schwarz at Chicago’s Water Tower Place, was a candy store, and he decried what he saw as high prices for the few plush toys that the store carried there.
Morgan was seeing FAO Schwarz in the throes of change. At press time FAO Inc. had sold the flagship New York and Las Vegas stores, while the fate of the other 13 FAO Schwarz units was uncertain. And despite the chain’s history of offering astounding toys, it had of late begun selling pretty much the same merchandise as its competitors around the country.
FAO Schwarz was founded in Baltimore in 1862 by German immigrant Frederick August Otto Schwarz. In 1870 he moved to New York City and opened the Schwarz Toy Bazaar on Broadway. With the help of three brothers, Schwarz stayed in touch with European sources for toys, moving in 1880 to larger quarters in the city’s Union Square, then a fashionable shopping district, according to the company’s published history. After moving to two other New York sites, the store relocated uptown to 745 Fifth Ave. in 1931 and remained there until 1986, when it moved 93 feet across the street to its present location on 767 Fifth Ave.
The chains that became sister stores of FAO Schwartz were founded later. In 1991 the first Zany Brainy, offering toys deemed to be more educational than the fare in regular toy stores, opened in Wynnewood, Pa.; that same year the first Right Start opened across the country in Westlake Village, Calif. In 2001 The Right Start bought Zany Brainy, then acquired FAO Schwarz in 2002 and took the name FAO Inc.
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