N.Y. / REGION

Goodbye F.A.O. Schwarz: Toy Lovers Prepare for Store’s Closing

By JAMES BARRONMAY 27, 2015

Greeters at the Fifth Avenue entrance of the F. A. O. Schwarz store in Midtown Manhattan.CreditKarsten Moran for The New York Times

Melissa Quiñones remembers the promises her parents made before they immigrated to New York from Colombia in the early 1990s: “You get to go to McDonald’s and the biggest toy store there is,” Ms. Quiñones, now 32, recalled.

She resisted, with all the willpower of a 9-year-old, until her parents announced that they were going on a weeklong vacation at Christmastime in chilly, wintry New York. Faster than she could say a certain address on Fifth Avenue, her resistance melted.

“I remember walking into F. A. O. Schwarz and saying: ‘We get to come here whenever we want? Give me a Big Mac and let me play on that piano,’ ” she said, referring to the giant illuminated keyboard that Tom Hanks and Robert Loggia danced on in the movie “Big.” “It was like the United States was one great toy store.”

But now the wonderland that she remembers is closing, another casualty in a shopping district where rents are surging.

Toys “R” Us, the chain that has owned F. A. O. Schwarz since 2009, said this month that the store would shut down on July 15, even though the lease is far from up. Toys “R” Us said it had worked out “an early exit in advance of the 2017 lease expiration, providing the opportunity to realize meaningful rent savings.”

Melissa Quiñones outside of F. A. O. Schwarz last week. Her parents first took her to the store when she was a child in the 1990s.CreditKarsten Moran for The New York Times

As for what happens next, Toys “R” Us said the F. A. O. Schwarz brand would continue in Toys “R” Us stores and online. Toys “R” Us had reportedly looked at space on the lower level of the office building at 1633 Broadway, close to Times Square, but F. A. O. Schwarz is leaving Fifth Avenue with no fixed destination.

It is too soon for the “everything must go” signs. But on a recent weekday, a clearance sign was on a bin of “F. A. O. exclusive” black bears. Stuffed, of course. The sign said they had been marked down to $74.98, from $99.99, a 25 percent reduction. Steps away was a much larger bear. It had not been discounted from $799.99.

For millennials like Ms. Quiñones, news of the closing was disquieting. It was almost as if the fantasy stage set of childhood was about to be demolished. Even if they came from households with Toys “R” Us budgets, they knew the layout of F. A. O. Schwarz by heart. They knew what was in every square foot of the store, which, as it happens, is about two-thirds the size of a professional football field, if the end zones are included.

Ms. Quiñones visiting the store in the 1990s.

“My childhood was F. A. O. Schwarz,” said Shira Underberger, 25, who was raised in Easton, Conn. “It was to toy stores what Apple stores are to technology. It was its own world, it wasn’t just a store. You had the talking tree when you walked in. You had the piano you could step on. You had all the stuffed animals, any animal you could think of.

“But it was really the experience of going. It was like a kids’ museum. I would go to the natural history museum with my mom for the educational angle, but I would make my aunt and uncle take me to F. A. O. Schwarz. That, to me, was a kid’s dream.”

But — and this hints at the challenges facing a retailer like F. A. O. Schwarz — she remembers only one purchase, a pink Penelope the Pup toy. She still guards it, to the extent that she can from 60 miles away in Manhattan, where she now lives. “My mom, every so often, tries to move stuff up to the attic — that dog and my collection of Gund teddy bears,” she said. “I won’t let her.”

Children playing on the store's floor keyboard in 2006. CreditJames Estrin/The New York Times

If the store was a stage set for millennials, it was also a stage set for their parents, who marveled at — well, whatever parents marveled at besides the prices at the cash registers. And if the parents’ own childhoods had included F. A. O. Schwarz, they probably realized that the store had been 93 feet away when they were kids. For years, F. A. O. Schwarz was on the southeast corner of Fifth Avenue and 58th Street. It moved to the northeast corner, to space in the General Motors Building, in 1986.

Either way, it was a fixture. It fit “a certain idea of classic New York that had to do with the Plaza Hotel and Eloise,” said Lily Swistel, a customer as a child who grew up in Manhattan and now lives in Brooklyn. “But the Plaza has changed. It’s become condos.” (The Plaza still houses a hotel, but with 282 rooms, the hotel operation is smaller than before much of the building was turned into expensive condominiums.)

F. A. O. Schwarz remains one of New York’s most venerable retail brands, having outlasted other carriage-trade stores such as B. Altman, Bonwit Teller and Best & Company. The store began as Schwarz Brothers Importers soon after the Civil War. It was the Manhattan outpost of a family-run operation from Baltimore, but the other brothers disappeared from the marquee in a few years. The one who remained, Frederick August Otto Schwarz, made the store his. It probably helped that many people saw in him more than a passing resemblance to Santa Claus.

A woman posing with two greeters dressed as toy soldiers outside the F. A. O. Schwarz store in Midtown Manhattan last week. CreditKarsten Moran for The New York Times

He concentrated on intriguing toys at premium prices. He had to, said Christopher Byrne, the creative director of TTPM.com, an online toy review — in those days, most toys were imported from Europe. “There were very, very few manufactured toys in the U.S.,” he said. “These were luxury goods, the dolls and the trains and the building blocks, and these were unheard-of.”

There was a time when F. A. O. Schwarz was a status symbol. “Their slate blue box under the Christmas tree was as impressive to child as a Tiffany box would have been to a grown-up in New York,” Mr. Byrne said.

Those were the days when F. A. O. Schwarz published “this huge Neiman Marcus-style catalog that came to people’s homes.” He said the catalog, as much as anything else, had established the company’s identity from the moment Mr. Schwarz put out the first one in the 1870s. But catalogs have long since become passé, and ogling toys in a store “is not really an American pastime anymore,” he said.

“Kids still love looking at toys, but they’re doing it on their iPads and their phones and their different devices,” he said. “The image of the saucer-eyed child looking at some object of desire is the same, but the child is looking at a tablet.”

Which is not the kind of experience Ms. Quiñones remembers.

“Walking out of there with a $7.99 Barbie, I was out of my mind with happiness,” she said. “For my parents, as an immigrant family, not to have to spend a lot just to experience being in this massive toy store, it didn’t matter the price point of the toy. That was the great thing about F. A. O. You could spend $8 or $1,500 and your child would walk out with the same feeling.”