The First Of Toys 'R' Us

What Do You Think You're Looking At? #245

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Toys ‘R’ Us has been in the news a bit lately.

Work for the movie “Roofman” included building a set as close as possible to an actual, functioning, period-correct Toys ‘R’ Us store from the early 2000s. And, more notable, the brand has been resurrected as a brick-and-mortar chain recently, moving beyond the mini-departments inside Macy’s stores to standalone flagship stores—one of which just opened in Maryland a few weeks ago.

That got me thinking about how the chain got its start.

I spent a fair bit of time reading about old Toys ‘R’ Us stores to put this piece together. You never know what will end up being a lead: often a comment on a thread or on an online story will give you an important piece of information. (I also accidentally read a Reddit horror story about some folks who found a Toys ‘R’ Us years after the chain’s bankruptcy, but all the toys were Satanic, or something—I was just super curious about the idea of one single store surviving out there under some wonky business arrangement.)

By some definitions or characterizations, the first Toys ‘R’ Us, ever, was in Washington, D.C. This is a somewhat well-known bit of trivia among locals, and the building is locally famous too, because it’s still standing and now houses the blues bar Madam’s Organ, in the Adams Morgan neighborhood.

Here’s a nice history of the store from the blog Ghosts of DC:

Charles Lazarus, the founder of Toys “R” Us started out with a small store at 2461 18th St. NW. He had returned from World War II, and in 1948, at the age of 25, saw an opportunity to capitalize on the growing baby boom with a store to capture this market, Children’s Bargain Town.

So, every time you order another round at Madams Organ, think about all the happy children who used to roam the building, looking for new toys.

And here’s a local news story, from around the time of the Toys ‘R’ Us bankruptcy:

The company famous for its sprawling toy stores across the country got its start as a family business in the Washington, D.C. neighborhood of Adam Morgan, where the bar Madam’s Organ is now.

Toys R Us founder Charles P. Lazarus opened his first store there in 1948. He was born in the building, where his family lived on the second floor. On the first floor was a bicycle shop that his father ran. When Lazarus returned from World War II, he took over the business and made it his own.

At first, he sold baby furniture and called the store Children’s Bargain Town.

Ten years later, he started selling baby toys, changed the store’s name to Toys R Us and opened a second store, in New Jersey. The company’s global headquarters would eventually be located there.

Born in the building! Imagine that: a quintessential suburban chain born from a humble, old-fashioned urban pattern. Learning about these little details is so cool.

But that last bit there, about the second store being in New Jersey, is almost certainly mistaken.

To be fair, there is a bit of confusion around the early timeline of the Toys ‘R’ Us company, and given the sources easily available, I was not able to nail down every detail.

Apparently, the company’s own official history left out a piece of the story, about the sale to a company called Interstate Department Stores in the 1960s, and how the Toys ‘R’ Us chain/brand was combined with a very similar chain from the Chicago area, Children’s Bargain Town U.S.A.¹, which was also acquired by Interstate. Here’s a brief history of the Interstate period.

And here is a nice write-up of that Chicago connection from Pleasant Family Shopping, an excellent blog on retail history.

I want to share this neat comment buried in that blog. This little anecdote conveys the fact that at one time, Toys ‘R’ Us was a modern and forward-looking company:

At that point, Charles Lazarus was heavily into standardization, and the use of computers for tracking inventory. It was rumored that during store tours, he would ask to be blindfolded, and walked into a store, making a set pattern of turns and steps, and expect his hand to land on exactly the item that was supposed to be there.

It’s NCR 280 cash registers could, in same time, track sales and inventory (most times, data was transmitted over night, it was really not live all the time). Amazing since today, many retailers still do not have that ability. They used their own system of code bars on sales tickets, and later converted to OCR.

This missing Chicago connection is not the only unclear point in the company’s history. Here is an image commonly found online, generally cited as being of the original D.C. store, but I’m not sure about that; at least, I can’t track down the original source of the picture.

Geoffrey the Giraffe is already being used, so you might think it’s a relatively recent photo; but a quick search for “What year was Geoffrey the Giraffe introduced?” yields 1973, 1965, and the 1950s. (It looks like the giraffe originated in the 1950s, when he was known as Dr. G. Raffe, was updated in the 1960s, and “officially” made the store mascot in 1973.)

Also note that the store is called Children’s Supermart but has the tagline of “Bargain Town U.S.A.” This may be after the Interstate acquisition, or the Bargain Town U.S.A. name might just have been hit upon twice, separately. I was not able to confirm that.

As far as the original D.C. location, there’s also this image that someone shared with me on Facebook. The fellow who shared it thinks it’s from around 1959.

It does not look much like the current Madam’s Organ building, which could be because the building has been modified/renovated. But most glaringly, the block of rowhouse-type structures of which Madam’s Organ is located is made up of mostly three-story buildings, while the structures in this old photo are only two stories tall.

Also note the backwards R in the Children’s Supermart name, which is where the backwards R in Toys ‘R’ Us came from!

There’s one more complication on the company’s early D.C. history. According to this Washington Post piece on the history of Toys ‘R’ Us, there was another proto-Toys ‘R’ Us store located in D.C., that predated the first suburban locations, but was much more like a modern Toys ‘R’ Us than the initial D.C. store. This second D.C. store is reported to have been on K Street. It is possible that one or both of those vintage photos are actually of the K Street, not the Adams Morgan, location.

The Post piece also says that the first store, the one in Adams Morgan, was not actually named Children’s Supermart, and that that name was devised for the larger K Street store. It also finds no use of the actual Toys ‘R’ Us name until the 1960s, though I think this is incorrect.

Because if the location and name history were not confusing enough, it turns out that the phrase “Toys ‘R’ Us” originated as a slogan for the stores when they were still known as Supermarts (backwards R included—but this time the first and not the second R).

In this old ad, which only lists two store locations and is therefore probably still in the 1950s, we see a giraffe who may or may not be Geoffrey saying “Toys ‘R’ Us!” in small print, next to the big Supermarts name. And then, tucked away in the bottom corner, that slogan again in what looks a lot like the ultimate logo.

And, according to this old photograph, “The Children’s Bargain Town”—backwards R in “children’s”—was used as a slogan early on, after the store name officially became Toys ‘R’ Us! Wow. I find it almost comical how many combinations and permutations there were before the chain settled on a single, clear name and branding.

One more note, which may not be obvious today: the “Supermart” branding was a reference to supermarkets and the idea of self-serve retail, which was still somewhat innovative in the 1950s. It was so new that the concept of a “toy supermarket”—a self-serve store dedicated to something other than food—was a distinct idea, and not just the way retail was done.

Even the idea of toy stores, at all, was relatively new. Toys were often sold as seasonal goods in various types of stores; that is what “toys in every store” refers to, for example, in “It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas.”

This isn’t really all so long ago, but it’s a different world.

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That is not quite the end.

That D.C. store (one of them!) is technically the first Toys ‘R’ Us at least in some sense; but I was after the first Toys ‘R’ Us. Not the store that birthed the chain, but the first location that invented or debuted the basic format on which the chain ran until its bankruptcy in 2018.

Whatever the case with the K Street store in D.C., it seems clear that the first suburban, big-box store focusing on toys (but probably properly named Toys ‘R’ Us a few years after opening) was not in New Jersey, but in Rockville, Maryland, a suburb of Washington, D.C.

While this factoid itself is easy to confirm, nobody reporting it included the exact address, or whether the building was still standing.

This article, “The First Toys R Us Ever Was In…Rockville,” did helpfully include a vintage photo of the Rockville store, however. (Notice the signage says both “Toys ‘R’ Us” and “Children’s Discount Supermarts”—no backwards R!).

The article includes some of the now-familiar history, which we’ve now learned may be incomplete:

Charles P. Lazarus, a Washington, D.C. native, founded the company now known as Toys R Us. In 1948, he opened a baby furniture store named Children’s Bargain Town. Two years later, in 1950, he added a few select toys to his inventory. It wasn’t long before he realized that toys, unlike furniture, tended to break or quickly fall out of favor with children, prompting him to introduce a larger toy selection while scaling back on furniture.

In 1957, Lazarus adopted a supermarket-style shopping experience that allowed customers to walk around with a cart and choose items that caught their eye. His first Toys R Us location opened on Route 355 in Rockville, Maryland, slightly north of the Mid-Pike plaza site now remembered by many—a spot once home to Mi Rancho and Chesapeake Seafood House, near today’s Party City.

Those location hints were helpful, and between that and some help from a Rockville Facebook group I belong to, I was able to answer the question, “Is the first true Toys ‘R’ Us store in America still standing?” And the answer is:

There it is. That is the building—shot by me on December 10, 2025—which housed America’s very first Toys ‘R’ Us.

The building is basically intact, but it has been altered inside quite a bit. If you go around the side, you can see it has been partially converted into a strip plaza, with a partial second floor (perhaps the second floor was already there, as a backroom/manager’s office):

Here, from this Montgomery County aerial imagery viewer, is the current view, with the building in the middle and Rockville Pike just to the left:

It’s actually, currently, three distinct structures: the white-roofed one, the old Party City segment which is attached to the white-roofed one, and the space on the far right (you can a line on the roof dividing the old Party City from the rightward segment). So what’s going on there? Was this entire large multi-piece structure once home to Toys ‘R’ Us?

No. The small extension on the right of the Party City was built second out of the three segments, and was always a mini strip plaza. The middle section, the former Party City, was built first, and it actually housed the Toys ‘R’ Us originally. It was built a little bit before 1957, the year the store opened.

The much larger space, with the white roof, was built by Toys ‘R’ Us when it expanded in the late 1960s. (That’s the segment you mostly see in that vintage photo of the Rockville store.) Accounts differ as to whether the original space was vacated, or whether Toys ‘R’ Us occupied the original segment and the addition. In the vintage photo, it like the word “Toys” is written on the front of the old space, suggesting maybe both of them were occupied.

What is clear is that both the original space and the expansion are still standing. And none of the various accounts of early Toys ‘R’ Us history include that fact, or give a side-by-side of the vintage and current imagery!

Now, just in case there’s any doubt at all (and there isn’t, because the build dates on the current structures line up with the Toys ‘R’ Us timeline), go back and look at the old Rockville photo and my current one.

Look at the right side of the addition, and you can see that some of the brick patterning survives unchanged. Also, an unpainted original brick wall survives, where the old store and the expansion meet. But coolest of all, and proof all on its own, is the placement of the fire bells.

Look above the big yellow car, on the right side of the frame, in the vintage photo. There’s one fire bell on each segment of the building, right around where they meet. Then look at my photo, and there are two fire bells in the same spot!

And they look pretty old to me! This is the one on the expansion, but they both appear to be of the same general age. This one is a Raisler/Grimes fire bell, which appears to be from the 1960s. I feel pretty confident saying these are the same bells that sat on the front of the first Toys ‘R’ Us:

Is that cool or what? An extra piece of little-known history in the confusing but nostalgic history of a beloved American business, which was born in Maryland, and is now, almost three quarters of a century later, doing business here again.

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Related Reading:

Didn’t Used To Be A Pizza Hut

Taking Preservation Into Their Own Hands

Burger Warehouse

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1. Which is, confusingly, extremely similar to a name/slogan used at one point by the original D.C. store!