Toys R Us built a Times Square store with a Ferris wheel — the rent outgrew the toys

Toys R Us opened its Times Square flagship in 2001: a 110,000-square-foot, four-level store built as a tourist attraction as much as a toy shop, with a 60-foot indoor Ferris wheel, a six-meter animatronic Tyrannosaurus Rex and a life-size Barbie dollhouse. The lease locked in Times Square rent from an earlier era, before the neighborhood's retail values climbed into the country's highest.

By the mid-2010s, ground-floor Times Square retail space was being marketed at roughly $2,500 a square foot, against the roughly $400 a square foot the original 2001 lease reflected. A brick-and-mortar toy retailer already losing ground to Amazon and Walmart could not carry that rent on toy margins alone, and Toys R Us chose not to renew.

The store closed for good on December 30, 2015, after 14 years, taking its Ferris wheel and dinosaur with it. Toys R Us itself filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy less than two years later, in September 2017, and liquidated its remaining U.S. stores in 2018.