[Vision2020] The Great Divide, Now in the Toy Aisle

Art Deco art.deco.studios at gmail.com
Mon Dec 10 10:11:00 PST 2012


  [image: The New York Times] <http://www.nytimes.com/>

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December 8, 2012
The Great Divide, Now in the Toy Aisle By GINIA
BELLAFANTE<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/b/ginia_bellafante/index.html>

Earlier this year, at the 109th Annual American International Toy Fair,
held at the Javits Convention Center as one of the culture’s most
convincing cases for childlessness, a former investment banker named Jill
Todd displayed “The Tuneables,” an interactive DVD series she had created
through her company, the Music Intelligence Project.
<http://www.musicintelligenceproject.com/>The daughter of two
musicologists, Ms. Todd developed the project in conjunction with her
parents as an instructional system in melody, rhythm and tone — the
fundamentals of music leveraged as a means to enhance cognitive function.
Nearby, but easily obscured by the acres of primary-color plastic, was a
booth for a company called Fat Brain Toys <http://www.fatbraintoys.com/>,
whose games and puzzles in logic and sequencing came with an impressive
lineage, some of them designed by the celebrated inventor Ivan Moscovich, a
Holocaust survivor.

Walking into one of the three branches of Toys “R” Us now in the Bronx, you
would find nothing from either of these ventures. Just as we are unlikely
to unearth dilled artisanal long beans from the farms of northern Vermont,
we are unlikely to find these sorts of diversions — small-batch toys aimed
at the parent for whom it is never too early to begin LSAT drills — in
large retail chains. Instead, they are the provenance of independent toy
stores that maintain a presence almost exclusively in the city’s most
affluent neighborhoods.

In the 1970s, the receipt of a Fisher Price farm set on Christmas Day would
have conferred nothing terribly distinctive about class, having come from a
department store and having appeared just as probably under the tree of a
white-shoe lawyer as it would have under the tree of a brick layer. But
toys, like lettuces or chocolate, have long since become another
manifestation of difference. (And this is even before we arrive at an
absurdity like the $1,499.99
Etch-a-Sketch<http://www.fao.com/product/index.jsp?productId=12131515>encased
in Swarovski crystals, currently at F. A. O. Schwarz, something
that would appear to have been created as an engagement offering for an
8-year-old Trump to give a 6 ½-year-old Kardashian.)

What finds its way off the shelves of the chains is not what disappears
from stores like Boomerang in TriBeCa, or Mary Arnold, the 81-year-old toy
store on the Upper East Side. At those stores, the best-selling product of
recent years has been something called
Magna-Tiles,<http://www.magnatiles.com/>geometrically shaped magnetic
tiles that allow children to imaginatively
build virtually anything but what, in my experience, often turns out
looking like the Crystal Cathedral in Southern California. Last Christmas,
a flood near the factory where the tiles are made in Asia caused a shortage
and a rise in price, with boxes of tiles, which usually retail for roughly
$1 a tile, going for hundreds of dollars on eBay. By Dec. 12 last year,
Ezra Ishayik, the owner of Mary Arnold, told me, he’d sold $20,000 worth of
tiles and had run out.

Magna-Tiles are not sold at Toys “R” Us. Uninterested in sharing company
with licensed products rendered in offensive colors, manufacturers like
these resist the taint of the mass market, selling instead in museum gift
shops and small, aesthetically palatable shops that draw from a narrow
slice of our demographics. At the same time, as Sean McGowan, a toy
industry analyst at the investment bank Needham & Company explained it, the
market for educational toys is never quite as big as we would like it to
be. While a company like Toys “R” Us carries educational toys, over time
its commitment to promoting them has eroded, he said.

In many parts of the city, though, beyond Manhattan and the various
precincts of brownstone Brooklyn, something like Toys “R” Us is really all
that exists. As I learned when I phoned recently, Castle Hill Toys and
Games in the Bronx, for instance, doesn’t consider itself much of a toy
store at all anymore, having transitioned into a focus on bikes and bike
repairs when Toys “R” Us came to be common in the borough.

In the way that we have considered food deserts — those parts of the city
in which stores seem to stock primarily the food groups Doritos and Pepsi —
we might begin to think, in essence, about toy deserts and the implications
of a commercial system in which the least-privileged children are choked
off from the recreations most explicitly geared toward creativity and
achievement.

It was precisely with this notion in mind that Dawn Harris-Martine — a
former New York City schoolteacher who sent two daughters to Hunter College
Elementary School, and one of them on to Wharton — expanded her Harlem
bookstore six years ago to include toys geared in obvious ways toward
intellectual development. Called Grandma’s
Place,<http://www.grandmasplaceinharlem.com/>it originated as a
literacy center, with Ms. Harris-Martine teaching both
parents and children to read. What she realized, she said, was that many
parents didn’t know that play served as a major component of early
learning. “As a parent, I had never bought a toy in a five-and-dime,” she
said.

The obvious counterpoint to these arguments is that there is no clear proof
that toys intended to bolster cognitive abilities actually do so. At the
very least, though, they signal to a child a parental investment in
ambition and accomplishment, in active absorption over passive observation.
It would take a very expansive view of the iCarly Truth or Dare
Bear<http://www.amazon.com/iCarly-Truth-or-Dare-Bear/dp/B003AJ585A>to
believe it might do the same thing.

E-mail: bigcity at nytimes.com

-- 
Art Deco (Wayne A. Fox)
art.deco.studios at gmail.com
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