Stairway to heaven

This month many of you will return to the American International Toy Fair—you may even be there as you read this column. As always, it will be in New York City, a place variously exciting, overwhelming, too fast or not quite as vibrant as it used to be, depending on your perspective.

Many of the day-to-day details will look familiar to those of you who have been to the show before: extended days that start with breakfast meetings, continue through lunches on the run, and end after a round of parties at night. There'll be obstacles to overcome (“I know FedEx delivered that package here…somewhere”), victories (“We just made our first sale of the show!”) and periods of alternating quiet and crush. And, like any tradeshow, there will be many pairs of tired feet. But because this is Toy Fair in New York, there will also be small instances specific to this event, even if they're only the long lines at the Javits Center taxi stand or the coat check tables as the time of day approaches when dusk turns Javits' glass ceiling from wintry gray to a slowly rotating series of sunset hues.

One thing that will remain a Toy Fair tradition in 2006 is the International Toy Center, that historic warren of oddly shaped rooms and anonymous hallways that the toy business has called home for the last several decades. But its days as an incubator for a million and one ideas about how to make a child smile are over when this year's Toy Fair is done.

A new Toy Center will probably arise somewhere else in New York City, or maybe Orlando, Fla., or even Bentonville, Ark., under a similar or entirely different name—or maybe not at all. The usefulness of an industry-specific showroom building, perhaps has had its day in the sun, replaced by Blackberries and streaming video, PDF catalogs and other technological improvements that make “it's almost like being there” more cost effective than the time and expense to go somewhere and actually touch two styles of teddy bear to perform the “this one feels cuddliest—we'll buy it” test.

This will be my 11th Toy Fair. Looking back it seems nearly all my memories of those shows center around the International Toy Center. A lot of them have to do with the atmosphere in those two buildings—the ever-crowded elevators, where eye contact came second to scoping out other people's badges; the satisfaction of scoring someplace to sit down between appointments that wasn't on the floor; the weird confusion after coming out of one too many showrooms that caused you to forget what floor you were on and which way, left or right, was back to the elevators; the view of Madison Square Park from the Ninth floor sky bridge and how it slowly became cell phone central as the years progressed; and the smoothly worn steps from the lobby to the second floor, which when I climbed them made me think about how many people must had done so before me to show off their latest ideas: a ray gun that shot sparks, a spring that walked down stairs, an 'action figure, not doll' for boys or a gizmo that plugged into your TV so you could play something approximating tennis. I'll miss the Toy Center if only because, somehow, that bit of history won't be there to connect tomorrow's Toy Fair with more than 100 years of Toy Fairs past.

If you've been reading Playthings, visiting our Web site or receiving our email newsletter, you know the effort we've put into covering the status of the ITC and its still-undetermined replacement. We plan to continue that effort until a new showroom building is established or the search scrapped. This month on our Web site, www.playthings.com, we are featuring a question each week related to the ITC's future. We want to know what you think about the prospect of a new “toy building” and hope you'll see the opportunity as one to participate in some small way in the direction that the future takes.