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By Root 669 0

elevator rising through the middle. The glass façade of the store is covered with square canvas panels, 155 in all, each of which carries eight images; the panels can be rotated like a shade, so that Toys “R” Us is effectively covered by an ever-changing billboard. The panels can also be rendered transparent so that pedestrians can look straight into the store. And what they see, from the outside, is the centerpiece of the store, of the company, and of the Toy Universe itself: a sixty-foot-high Ferris wheel that rises from the basement toward the upper reaches of the store, its giant red neon spokes flashing clockwise as the ride sedately rolls through the store, providing children and their parents an eagle eye of the store’s merchandise. It is also, at $2.50 a head, just about the cheapest form of entertainment in Times Square.

Newbold gave me a tour of the store several weeks after the opening. It quickly became plain that she is not only a highly professional store designer but a student of retail engineering. As we stood at the head of the escalator looking down toward the basement, with people pouring past us onto the main floor, she said, “Originally we thought we would use a merry-go-round or something like that. Then we thought, What a great way to make people look up, look down. As you cycle up, you can look around and see what’s on the floor.” The Ferris wheel was also a marketing device of its own. The names on the cars—Toy Story, Pokémon, Nickelodeon, and so on—represented not just familiar toys but “branding partners.” Each one was a brand of its own, sharing in the new Toys “R” Us brand and adding their luster to it, as Microsoft had done. Toys “R” Us charged each firm $250,000 for the “naming rights” (though the actual proceeds from the ride go to charity).

Newbold explained that a ride originating in the basement had an additional advantage. “Besides coming in and saying, ‘Oh, wow!,’ in order to board the Ferris wheel you have to go down to the lowest level, which traditionally in New York is very hard to get people down to.” We took the escalator down to the lower level and walked along a path to the edge of the “R Zone,” the electronics area that is any toy store’s highest-volume selling space. Everything in the R Zone was zapping, bonking, and blinking all at once. Newbold had to raise her voice. “If you’re interested in electronics,” she cried enthusiastically, “you’re going to get sucked right in!” It was the Christmas season, and the crowd in the store was swelling; the sound system boomed out “I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus,” and then “Feliz Navidad.” A magician at a station was demonstrating card tricks. Images were flashing across video screens. The Ferris wheel, with its great red neon spokes, was rolling. Noise, lights, crowds, motion— everything was happening at once. It all felt like 42nd Street under glass.

And yet at the same time the store had been ingeniously engineered so as to channel the feverish energies it released. The selling floors are organized in a “racetrack” format so that, Newbold said, “you get pulled from one department to another by seeing something ahead of you.” Every other Toys “R” Us store has an armada of shopping carts parked near the front entrance, but shopping carts would take up too much room in this dense urban setting; instead, shoppers get big shoulder bags. This could pose a problem of its own, but the store specializes in what Newbold calls “affordable portables.” Newbold obviously had given a good deal of thought to the problem of traffic management in what was destined to be the busiest toy store in the world. As we stood looking into the R Zone, she said, “We only have eight Play Station positions, so it won’t become an arcade. What we tried to do was have the perception of interactivity without real interaction. Knowing that the traffic would be as dense as it is, we didn’t want people pushing buttons on things, and starting things and stopping them, because they would break in a day, and people would come the next day and they wouldn’t work. That would