Santa's workshop may be a lot closer to home than you think.
It's New York City — not the North Pole — that hosts the Western Hemisphere's largest toy tradeshow every year.
The next North American International Toy Fair is set to take place in February 2017 at the Jacob Javits Center, but it used to convene in two buildings at the intersection of Fifth Avenue and 23rd Street.
The International Toy Center, as the buildings came to be called, first opened in the Flatiron District in 1909. Toy manufacturers began opening sales rooms and offices in the center as early as 1910. The buildings served as a focal point for the toy industry after World War I, when it shifted production from Germany to the U.S., through the end of the 20th century. Developers converted one building into office space in 2008, the other into condos in 2011.
Still, "most companies really do think of New York City as an unofficial home no matter where they’re based at this point, because for so many years they had their showrooms and they all came together — and still do — at Toy Fair," said Adrienne Appell, a toy trend specialist for the Toy Industry Association.
Here are five other entertaining facts Appell taught us about the history of toys in New York City:
A New York publishing company printed some of the first coloring books
Known best for pioneering the systematic use of color printing in children's books, McLoughlin Bros. Inc. ran out of Manhattan offices and Brooklyn factories from the mid 1800s until 1920, when competitor Milton Bradley bought the company.
The McLoughlin Brothers Edmund and John Jr. are credited with publishing the first coloring books in the 1880s, starting with the "Little Folks' Playtime Painting Book."
Today, coloring books are all the rage among adults who use them as an alternative form of meditation.
A New York businessman invented roller skates that could actually turn
The roller rinks that rose to the peak of their popularity in the 1950s and saw a resurgence in the 1970s would not have been possible without the four-wheel skates that James Plimpton developed in 1863.
Earlier in-line models had made it difficult for skaters to turn or stop.
Plimpton's invention had a pivoting action with a rubber cushion that permitted skaters to curve left or right by leaning in that direction.
The father of modern roller skating built a rink and leased out skates in the office of his New York City furniture business. He also founded the New York Roller Skating Association to boost the fledgling sport.
Today, New Yorkers can skate at rinks in Brooklyn Bridge Park and Prospect Park.
The iconic doll company Madame Alexander operated out of Harlem headquarter for half a century
Beatrice Alexander Behrman, the daughter of Russian immigrants, started making her rosy-cheeked, elaborately dressed dolls in 1923. She moved her doll factory from Kips Bay to a Harlem building at 615 West 131st St. in the mid-1950s.
Behrman's company evolved into and remained one of the neighborhood's largest private employers for decades. Even after production shifted overseas in the 1990s, doors to the Madame Alexander headquarters remained open to designers, seamstresses and other doll artisans. Inside beckoned a doll museum, a small store and a doll "hospital" or repair shop.
The space was quietly shuttered after a Midtown-based toy manufacturer acquired the company.
