As FAO sinks, so do city’s spirits

Across Fifth Avenue at the Plaza, you could almost hear Eloise weeping -- “No, no, no, not FAO!”

The signs lining the aisles of what was once America’s most famous toy store, FAO Schwarz, were downright shocking: “Gigantic Christmas Sell-off.” “Everything Must Go.” “10% to 20% off Everything.”

This level of distress you hear, maybe, on lower Fifth Avenue when a souvenir store goes bust in August. But never, never, never before Christmas in an area of Manhattan known for ritualistic big spending.

Really, said one matron pulling her fur tightly around her as she entered Bergdorf Goodman across the street, how could FAO do anything so tacky?

Quite easily, as it turns out.

After 141 years in business, most notably from a flagship store on Fifth Avenue, the company that owns the legendary toy vendor announced this month that it had filed for bankruptcy for the second time this year and was under pressure to find a buyer by Dec. 15 -- that’s today -- lest its lenders take it over. Even if somebody buys what remains of the company, including the famous name, it was clear last week that to many New Yorkers something special is passing. And New Yorkers get awfully prickly when that happens.

“I feel really depressed about this,” said Ripley Hatheway, 45, looking up at the blizzard of yellow and black sale signs. “I understand they have to raise cash, but couldn’t they have used nice signs, something classy or special?”

As a child, Hatheway visited FAO every Christmas with her grandmother. After the purchase of a special toy came tea with granny at the Plaza and then a little more shopping on Fifth Avenue. Hatheway remembered taking an escalator to the second floor of FAO and breezing down an enormous slide right in the middle of the store to the first floor.

“It was such a thrill to be so little, rushing down amid all those beautiful toys,” she sighed.

But Hatheway stopped shopping at FAO when branches started springing up in malls around the country and the New York flagship lost its exclusivity. It began to operate like any other chain store, offering predictable merchandise but often at higher prices than the chains. For her own son, now 7, there are bargains to be had elsewhere and small specialty stores around the city for unique gifts.

Last week, FAO’s failings seemed to be summed up in the face of a young man, dressed as a toy soldier, with painted red dots on his cheeks. As he welcomed two grandmothers visiting from England through enormous glass doors on Fifth Avenue, he displayed none of the Christmas joy in a place formerly so joyful it is said to have once caused a child to walk in and faint dead away. The soldier looked bored. It was a similar flatness that infected the Russian Tea Room before it went under several years ago. The waiters all spoke Spanish, not Russian, and their Cossack uniforms were made of polyester and ill-fitted.

New Yorkers relentlessly reminisce about the loss of some favorite place -- of a great bookstore on Madison Avenue; of the Automat on 42nd Street, where they used to peer through little windows at cream pies. A whole generation seems crippled because there are no subway tokens jingling in their pockets now that New York has Metro cards. And it’s amazing that some New Yorkers get through the day without a cream cheese-on-raisin-nut-bread sandwich from the defunct Chock Full O’Nuts, or through this or any season without those long-gone “B” stores on Fifth Avenue like B. Altman & Co. and Bonwit Teller.

All this mourning makes you wonder if a new generation will weep into caffe lattes years from now remembering the days when there was a Starbucks on every corner and a mammoth J. Crew near the tree in Rockefeller Center.

In a touching meditation on New York, Colson Whitehead writes in his recently published “The Colossus of New York” that we don’t just mourn our iconic places but also the insignificant ones that are part of each New Yorker’s personal skyline: “You swallow hard when you discover that old coffee shop is now a pharmacy, that the place where you first kissed So-and-so is now a discount electronics retailer, that where you bought this very jacket is now rubble behind a blue plywood fence.... Damage has been done to your city. You say, It happened overnight. But of course it didn’t.”

Over time, FAO apparently squandered its distinctiveness too -- with inept management, overexpansion and attempts to compete with rock-bottom prices, whether at Wal-Mart or on the Internet, not to mention the omnipresent Toys R Us.

It used to be when a company launched a new toy, it came for a public-relations fest at the FAO on Fifth. But two years ago, the new president of Toys R Us built a colossus in Times Square. A mammoth store -- part flagship, part theme park -- opened shortly after 9/11. Instead of a spectacular slide, it had a 20-foot-high animatronic T-rex and a 60-foot Ferris wheel. And the place is wired. So when ABC’s “Good Morning America” wants to do a toy-related segment, Diane Sawyer can just pop down the street from her Times Square studio and plug in for feed.

Still, no matter how much sense it may make for one institution to replace another in a city that constantly reinvents itself, those initials, FAO, still mean something in New York, no more so than to a man who bears them himself.

Frederick August Otto Schwarz Jr. is a 68-year-old lawyer and civic leader in New York City who once worked part time selling toys in the family store on Fifth Avenue. It was his great-grandfather who invented the toy store in Baltimore in the 1860s, and his grandfather who moved it to Union Square in New York, and his father, also an attorney, who was chairman of the board during the Great Depression when the store made the gutsy move to upper Fifth Avenue. And while Hatheway and others shopping at the dying flagship this week reminisced about the slide and favorite stuffed animals like Patrick and Peppermint carried exclusively by FAO Schwarz, F.A.O. Schwarz Jr., known as Fritz, remembered being enamored of a wonderful pool on the first floor of the Fifth Avenue store, filled with battleships and submarines, and with the huge tables covered with model trains on the second floor.

“It was a place of joy for people,” said Schwarz, whose family sold the business in the mid- 1960s and maintains a foundation that receives royalties for use of the name.

Schwarz, a tall, courtly man who has devoted his life to the law and public service, expressed a wistfulness that many in this city are now feeling about the passing of a favorite haunt:

“As a New Yorker I feel it, as a family member I feel it, and as someone who still uses those initials, well, it is sad. I feel it.”