You will not find the Toy District on any of the tourist maps or brochures. Located in the beautiful Skid Row area of Los Angeles, this eight block area contains over 500 toy dealers!
Most of what is sold in the district are imported "affordable" toys. Arriving at the Port of Los Angeles. Most came from China, Korea, Hong Kong and other manufacturing areas in the far east. But many things also come across the border from Mexico. While most of the dealers are wholesalers only, none want to see a business licensee or even a business card. If you have cash, and want a case load of Kewpie dolls, you got it!
Trucks come and go all day as boxes are unloaded right in the street as the alleys are also packed with dealers. Expect to see deals being made everywhere, in cars, in the streets and sometimes, in the stores! It's a crazy marketplace that feels more like a third world bazaar than a wholesale district.
From Wikipedia:
Before the arrival of the first toy merchants, the area was considered to be part simply of a Los Angeles skid row - an impoverished area habituated by the homeless - and one contemporary account described it as lying between Third, Fifth and Main streets and the Los Angeles River. Taiwanese and Vietnamese immigrants of Chinese descent opened up the first toy stores in the early 1980s, and at first these merchants sold toys only during holiday periods. Among them was the Woo family, and the most successful entrepreneur of that clan was Charles Woo, born in Hong Kong and settling in Los Angeles as a teenager in 1968. Woo was a physics student at UCLA when he took a summer off to help other family members launch ABC Toys, a wholesale business later operated by Shu Woo. By 1998 Woo and his family owned 10 Toy District buildings and a distribution company, Mega Toys, with $30 million in annual sales. Charles Woo was later considered to be the Toy District's "founding father." Woo said he built up the Toy District by encouraging other Asian-immigrant entrepreneurs who were buying toys from him to open their own businesses in the district
Predominantly a wholesale district for midrange to low-end stores nationwide, the 12-block area is also popular with individual bargain hunters. About a thousand shops, stalls and curbside stands fill the bustling area, roughly bounded by 3rd Street on the north, San Pedro Street on the east, 5th Street on the south and Los Angeles Street on the west. Along with toys, the shops are filled with housewares, sporting goods, silk flowers and clothing imported from such places as Thailand and Pakistan as well as China. Ninety percent of the stores sell at wholesale prices. Charles Woo said that he built up volume in his business by halving the 40 to 50 percent markup typically sought by traditional small toy wholesalers.
The growth of the toy industry in this area helped revive these economically stricken areas of Downtown Los Angeles, and the process gave birth to the Toy District, which by 2003 was home to hundreds of resellers of mostly Asian-made toys and other goods, with more than a billion dollars in sales each year. Los Angeles County has emerged as the gateway to most of the toys sold in U.S. retail stores and increasingly abroad. More than five hundred companies make up the toy industry in the county - not only in the Toy District - and they are mainly wholesalers who import dolls, radio-controlled cars and other goods from Pacific Rim countries. They generally are small, and they employ few workers each