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We rode an escalator back upstairs and continued on to the second floor. This is the store’s most dazzling retail area. Immediately to the right of the escalator were twenty-foot-high versions of the Empire State Building and the Chrysler Building made of Lego. Beyond them was the pièce de résistance—an animatronic Tyrannosaurus rex that emitted a mighty roar, just scary enough to give little kids a mild fright and make them come back for more. The roar cycle can be adjusted, so that on busy days the dinosaur can roar faster to keep the kids moving along. The T. rex marked the selling area for Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park toys, with which the company has an exclusive relation. Next came the silver space-ship of E.T., along with an animatronic version of the lovable alien. Then there was a Candyland that looked like the board game come to life, at least if you were four. Continuing on to the other side of the floor, we came to the Fisher-Price area, which, in a nice touch, had a little tableau of Times Square itself, looking very calm and sensible, with its little plastic people waiting at traffic lights. And then there was a giant Monopoly board, and a giant train set, and at the back of the floor an entire house for Barbie, with its very own elevator. Newbold explained that the displays had been designed so as to be understood from the Ferris wheel. “These are like instant visuals for kids. They don’t have to read a sign; they don’t have to read a graphic. It’s just like, ‘I see that dinosaur; when we get off, I’ve got to go over there.’” The whole store was semiotics for the preliterate.

Within weeks of its opening, the new Toys “R” Us store became one of the great tourist destinations of Times Square. It was a familiar name, whether you came from Decatur or Beijing, in an unfamiliar setting; and of course the kids loved it. It wasn’t unusual for the store to attract 100,000 visitors in a day, or to do $1 million worth of business—thirty truckloads’ worth of toys, as Elliott Wahle, the store manager, proudly pointed out to me, with each truck having to maneuver its way into Times Square, pull into the cramped loading dock, and then make a rapid exit. Vast crowds surged through the store even during the fallow season after Christmas. Wahle said that he was often asked whether it bothered him that so many people came to the new store to gawk rather than buy. “And the answer,” he said, “is, ‘Not in the least.’ This is a $13 billion business focused on a name. And the visit reinforces our brand in the minds of every single one of those visitors.” Wahle described the store as “the single greatest execution of the retail-tainment idea.” The store could lose money and still be an immense success, because it would make shoppers more inclined to go to the Toys “R” Us back home.

BUILDINGS, AND BUSINESS VENTURES, in Times Square have risen and fallen over the decades like so many stage sets; one of the few persistent elements in this rootless and transitory realm has been the dynastic real estate families, who never sell anything if they don’t have to, and thus pass their property intact from one generation to the next. The Moss family, which owns the parcel on 44th Street that Toys “R” Us leased, has had a presence in Times Square since the heyday of Oscar Hammerstein. B. S. Moss, the family patriarch, started building nickelodeons in Times Square in 1905; his peers were the Jewish entertainment moguls who went west and founded Hollywood. (It was his brother Paul who closed down burlesque as Mayor La Guardia’s license commissioner.) B.S. opened vaudeville theaters, which he ultimately folded into the Keith-Albee syndicate. Then he expanded into movie theaters. He bought the parcel on 44th Street when the Olympia came down, and in 1936, he and a partner opened up the New Criterion, a thoroughly modern movie house that they called “The Theatre of Tomorrow.” Engineers in a “tone-control booth” controlled “the slightest