Toy stores are always pretty happy places, and some of them manage to survive for ages. The oldest toy store in the US (as far as anybody knows; these things aren’t really studied) is F.A.O. Schwarz in New York City. It was opened in 1862 from the man who gave it its name: Frederick August Otto Schwarz.
F.A.O. (the person) was born in Prussia on October 18, 1836 and emigrated to the US when he was 20. His first job was in Baltimore, Maryland, where he worked in a stationery store. Some of the paper goods were imported from Germany, and the German exporters sometimes included other things with their shipments — including toys. Schwarz noticed that when he put toys in the display window, they sold faster than anything else.
It took him only a few years to open his own shop, where he decided to specialize in toys. In 1870 he moved the business to New York, where it was called the Schwarz Toy Bazaar. It was a success, and by 1897 the New York Times declared it “the largest dealer in toys in this city.”
By then Schwarz had begun his annual Christmas season promotions, which the store still does. Schwartz proclaimed his store was the “Original Santa Claus Headquarters,” and by 1876 was publishing an annual holiday catalog — another tradition that’s still in effect.
Nowadays the actual store is owned by the ThreeSixty Group, Inc, but the brand name F.A.O. Schwarz is still the property of the Schwarz family. The store is still an outlet for some German toy brands, including premium stuffed animals, and a signature toy is the “Walking Piano” — a pressure-sensitive mat that was featured in the movie Big. The store has appeared in a number of other films, too, and there’s a crystal shop in The Simpsons called FAO Quartz. This is all fine with the Schwarz family, which is headed up by…F.A.O. Schwarz. Not the founder — his great grandson. I think there’s been an F.A.O. Swartz in every generation since the 1860s. They’re not all toy vendors, though — the current holder of the name is a lawyer.
