FAO Schwarz
The toy store as a destination — the marble-and-magic Fifth Avenue palace with the giant walk-on piano from Big, toy-soldier doormen, and stuffed animals taller than you were. For a '90s kid, FAO Schwarz was the place a trip to New York was really about.
FAO Schwarz was founded in 1862 in Baltimore, under the name Toy Bazaar, by the German immigrant Frederick August Otto Schwarz. The store eventually became synonymous with Fifth Avenue in Manhattan: it moved to 745 Fifth Avenue in 1931, where it stayed for 55 years, then relocated to the General Motors Building at 767 Fifth Avenue in 1986. That flagship, with its grand entrance and floor after floor of toys, was less a shop than an event.
What sealed its place in the culture was a piano. The store's giant, dance-on floor keyboard was made famous by the 1988 Tom Hanks film Big, in which Hanks and Robert Loggia tap out "Heart and Soul" with their feet — a scene that brought international attention to the store and turned the piano into a pilgrimage. Through the 1990s, FAO Schwarz was the aspirational toy destination, the pre-digital-era toy palace a kid begged to visit.
The magic ran into hard economics in the 2000s. The company filed for bankruptcy on January 13, 2003, emerged that April, then filed again in December 2003; by January 2004 all 13 remaining locations had closed. The Fifth Avenue flagship reopened on Thanksgiving Day 2004, and after further changes of hands the brand was acquired by the ThreeSixty Group in October 2016, reopening a flagship at 30 Rockefeller Plaza on November 16, 2018 — a smaller echo of the wonderland it once was.
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