Yeah, it was located in that weird array of stores that had an upper level and lower level? You walked over the equivalent of a small "bridge" and there was a diner to the right if you were facing it?

Now that place was great. Crammed but a very good variety of old/new stuff. I remember spotting a Microman Police Keeper in their glass case in the 1990s.

That's exactly the place.

I wonder if anyone around here knows who that guy was. I miss that store a lot.

I accidentally stumbled into Mondo Kim's years ago during a trip to NYC and loved it. Love Saves The Day was a frequent stop on my way to Toy Tokyo, although TT always got my money and LSTD was just fun to browse.

Many of my best memories of NYC are on St. Marks. Bummer to see places like this go...

I think your mind will be blown, because I just found this. The name of the place is clearly Children of Paradise Toys. This is from a nice sized set of photos that were taken by a Japanese student who visited New York to learn about Yiddish theater back in the 1970s/1980s. He has some nice photos of Brighton Beach—the neighborhood I grew up in—and I was sorting through the pictures tonight before I contacted him about them and spotted this:


It always amazes me. I've been hunting for pics from old school NYC from friends and acquaintances in NYC for years. But it always seem non-Americans appreciate the cool stuff more than people here.

just trying to remember the kim's timeline of locations,,,anybody from the nyc old school please chime-in,,

1/ avenue a btw. 5th & 6th st
2/ bleeker & w. 10th st
3/ bleeker & la guardia
4/ st marks & corner of 2nd ave (upstairs)
5/ st marks super kims btw 2nd & 3rd ave
6/ now ????

are all of the above kim's now closed??

also anybody know if see hear still exists??

So wait, you found this at random?!!! like, you weren't looking for a picture of this store and it just popped up after we'd been talking about it?

talk about synchronicity!!!

Exactly. I grabbed these photos from that guy's site a while back since he's one of the few people who took pictures of the neighborhood I grew up in here in NYC. I was sifting through the photos to pic out a few of them to share with neighborhood friends and he took lots of shots around the Village and Chelsea (where he was staying) in the 1970s/1980s.