tell us about the Toy Shops of your childhood.

Americans call them Toy STORES of course.

As a kiddie I dreamed of going to America and New York and FAO Schwartz and in December 1974, age 11, I made it. I even took a pic from a top window - "the largest toy store in the world" which I'm posting below.

Funny thing was, it was smaller than London's Hamley's - so it was a bit of a swizz!

Anyhoo, I'd love to hear your memories and scattered pictures of your childhood toy stores, plz.

Mid-90s Toys R Us was a magical place.

The toy store we used to go to in the 1970's when I was a kid was called LIONEL LEISURE CITY.

I'm not even gonna write what I thought this thread was about.

In the Village shopping area in Houston, on University Boulevard, there was this great little toy store in the 60s and 70s that two old women ran. It wasn't well organized. You just had to wander around and see what you ran across. But they had all sorts of interesting toys you'd never find in a regular toy store. They had imported, educational but fun toys decades before you'd find them elsewhere in Houston. It was next to the Village Theatre.

Nowadays the Village seems to be a mix of chain stores on the big streets and odd shops on the side streets, but it was once almost all boutiques and specialty shops. The only chains there in my childhood were Craig's, Baskin-Robbins and Massin's.

In the 60's it was the toy section of the sears catalog. My brothers and I would circle the toys we wanted.

I spent my childhood in a camp making toys for spoiled Western children.

FAO Schwartz was a much better toy store before it moved from the Southeast corner of 58th & 5th Ave in NYC to the more spacious GM building. It helped build a bigger tourist customer base, but it lost a lot of it's character and quality of toys.

My favorite though was Geppetto's Toy Box which was initially at a hole in the wall store 161 7th Avenue for several years before moving to 10 Christopher Street. This time the store got even better with the move to the extra spaced location. You can tell ran the store out of love for what they were doing as much as for business. It was my go-to place to buy gifts for relatives. I even brought my niece and nephew there a few times, as well as out of town visitors. . I still have a beautiful large hand-crafted photo air balloon with passengers hanging in my family room I purchased from their original store in the 1990s, it's become a prized possession. Geppetto's finally closed around 2008, I think the owner had an injury or some other issue and the store became hard for him to manage. I still miss it.

R7 Correction: "hand-crafted HOT air balloon "

Anyone remember Buddy Brown Toys on Ventura Blvd. in Studio City?

There used to be a store in the mall called The Store of Knowledge. Pretty cool but not surprising it didn't last in this society.

I grew up in the sticks, so the best we had were the toy sections of the local five and dime plus the Sears and Wards catalogues.

R3 - always has his mind in the gutter...even FAO Schwartz makes him think of dildos.

[quote]FAO Schwartz was a much better toy store before it moved from the Southeast corner of 58th & 5th Ave in NYC to the more spacious GM building. It helped build a bigger tourist customer base, but it lost a lot of it's character and quality of toys.

I agree.

Not a toy store per se, but growing up in Miami, there was a store called Diamonds, I believe, and it had all sorts of small toys and doo dads and crafting things for women. Of course this little gay boy loved it. I have a memory of a huge wall of drawers with little small toys in each one.

[quote] FAO Schwartz

It's SCHWARZ, not Schwartz. (See the sign at r13.)

King Norman's Kingdom of Toys

Johnny's Toys used to send you a postcard with a little key on your birthday (I think that's right) and you could go to their Covington store to unlock their Magic Castle and pick up a free gift. How could your parents say No?

R177 Nice ad. I almost forgot people would often buy things using a store's layaway plan.

We didn't really have a toy store in my town. Like R11, the big deal for me was the annual Christmas edition of the Sears and JC Penny's catalogs.

By the time Toys R' Us became big in the 80s, I had aged out of toys. At that point, my cousins and I were more likely to be found in hobby and books shops, scouring the shelves for new D&D products.

I'd rather remember the toy factories

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