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<div class="">December 8, 2012</div>
<h1>The Great Divide, Now in the Toy Aisle</h1>
<h6 class="">By
<span>
<a href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/b/ginia_bellafante/index.html" rel="author" title="More Articles by GINIA BELLAFANTE"><span>GINIA BELLAFANTE</span></a></span></h6>
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<p>
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,<a title="Project Web site" href="http://www.musicintelligenceproject.com/"> the Music Intelligence Project. </a>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 <a title="Company Web site" href="http://www.fatbraintoys.com/">Fat Brain Toys</a>,
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. </p>
<p>
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. </p>
<p>
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<a title="Toy Web site" href="http://www.fao.com/product/index.jsp?productId=12131515"> $1,499.99 Etch-a-Sketch</a>
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 ˝-year-old Kardashian.) </p>
<p>
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 <a title="Toy Web site" href="http://www.magnatiles.com/">Magna-Tiles,</a>
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. </p>
<p>
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. </p>
<p>
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. </p>
<p>
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. </p>
<p>
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 <a title="Store Web site" href="http://www.grandmasplaceinharlem.com/">Grandma’s Place,</a>
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. </p>
<p>
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 <a title="Amazon link for the bear" href="http://www.amazon.com/iCarly-Truth-or-Dare-Bear/dp/B003AJ585A">iCarly Truth or Dare Bear</a> to believe it might do the same thing. </p>
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