Dolls with a difference
How American Girl Place was way ahead of its time
Twenty years ago, something strange called American Girl Place opened in Chicago. It was years ahead of its time. In fact, only now is it becoming clear just how far ahead the thinking behind that creation turned out to be.
The upscale doll company known as American Girl was the 1980s brainchild of a Chicagoborn teacher and writer with the delightful name of Pleasant Rowland. She’d decided to create a series of dolls based on historical figures after a visit to Colonial Williamsburg; Rowland thought that the dolls could be a tool to promote girls’ interest in American history. By the late 1990s, American Girl had become a hugely profitable business — its premium-priced, eminently collectible dolls had become objects of widespread desire. And once a girl had the doll, her attention usually turned to the myriad accessories also available for purchase.
Rowland then had another brilliant idea — American Girl Place, a combination retail store, destination, restaurant and theater, all themed around her American Girl empire. And she decided that the first one in America should be in Chicago.
By 1998, the 35,000-squarefoot American Girl Place had opened on Chicago Avenue, just west of Michigan Avenue. It was a huge tourist draw — anyone who, say, rode Amtrak to Michigan in that era can remember dolls occupying seat after seat, each one carefully tended to by their young owners.
Some of these dolls were patients recovering from a trip to the American Girl hospital inside American Girl Place. Others were
experiencing the afterglow of afternoon tea with their owners, an event enjoyed in special doll-size seats, the kind of generous touch that could make a doll feel as valued as a young person. For someone who was not in the target demographic, the store was a bizarre experience: highly trained and superbly coiffed sales associates seemed to treat the dolls as real people. American Girl Place had created an alternate universe where girls ruled.
American Girl Place was prescient in so many ways. While most stores in 1998 merely were selling stuff, American Girl Place was experiential retail, not so much about unloading items as letting people (in this case girls from about 8 to 13) spend time with a beloved brand in a relaxed environment. In time, most Michigan Avenue stores would copy this approach. But this was long before Crate & Barrel began to morph into a Starbucks Roastery.
In the basement of American Girl Place during the run-up to the holidays in 1998 was a full-blown show in a 150-seat theater, “The American Girl Revue,” performed several times a day, complete with a live band. “While live attractions built around a company's products are commonplace at theme parks and on tours,” I wrote at the time, “this marks the first time a free-standing retail outlet has produced a regularly scheduled live show with professional theater people.”
The idea had come from the songwriter and performer Gretchen Cryer, who did the deal with Rowland in a single meeting. Cryer wrote the show with her collaborator Nancy Ford; it was directed by Kim Rubenstein and produced by Elizabeth Richter. “The American Girl Revue” had three separate young casts and, that December, was being performed as often as 16 times a week. It ran for three years and played to close to 200,000 people. No one had done anything quite like it before. And no one has done so since.
By 2001, the store had a second, highquality show, hoping to persuade girls and their parents to return. A sequel of sorts, it was called "Circle of Friends: An American Girls Musical.” Whereas the first show had stayed within the historical context of the American Girl dolls, the new one had a contemporary, birthdayparty setting and was designed to offer tools to helps girls resolve the conflict in their lives — by looking at the struggles and achievement of girls in various periods of American history, the show insisted, a girl could find solutions to many of her own worries. By this point, American Girl had created its own ensemble of performing girls, held to professional standards and at least 40 strong.
And then, it all began to change. Around the opening of American Girl Place, Rowland sold her brand to Mattel for $700 million, meaning that her education-focused company became part of a larger brand. (Rowland and her husband, Jerome Frautschi, spent Mattel’s money well, reportedly donating a whopping $200 million to the construction of the Madison Overture Center for the Arts.) For a number of years, the Mattel subsidiary remained formidable: the dolls became
By 2001, American Girl had created its own ensemble of performing girls, held to professional standards and at least 40 strong.
the stars of movies and TV specials and American Girl Places expanded to other cities.
But in 2008, American Girl Place in Chicago moved to the Water Tower Place, a smaller space that did not include a theater, a business that did not especially interest Mattel. So the shows — with their complex human casts — ended. And the decade that followed was nowhere near as kind to these costly dolls as the one before.
The focus on history was becoming lost as Mattel generally contemporized the brand. There was even a new boy doll introduced, named Logan Everett. He was, and is, a drummer.
“American Girl dolls are dying, and taking Mattel with them,” read an apocalyptic 2017 headline in MarketWatch, atop an article noting sharp declines in demand for the dolls — they were down some 30 percent over the previous year. The American Girl Places — especially the one in New York — were proving to be very costly for Mattel to operate.
Some of the malaise could be attributed to the lousy retail business in general and the same structural changes that took down Toys R Us, but there also was no question that the new digital world was biting a chunk from these avowedly nondigital dolls. Too many girls now were more interested in Snapchat and Instagram, even if those channels were not looking out for their best interest as was Pleasant Rowland, first and foremost a teacher.
During the Mattel years, American Girl hit its fiscal peak in 2013 and has fallen every year since.
But this holiday season, a new American Girl show is touring (it will be in Skokie in December and at the Broadway Playhouse in 2019). This production has nothing in common with those shows created for Chicago, except, of course, for the American Girl brand. And it will be in ordinary theaters.
But as is the trend these days, the show trumpeted its “all-female creative team.”
It was as if no one knew that American Girl had “an all-female creative team” in Chicago 20 years ago.
When far fewer were paying attention to the stories being told to girls.
"American Girl Live!" will play Dec. 21-23 at the North Shore Center for the Performing Arts, 9501 Skokie Blvd., Skokie; www.northshorecenter.org