LEGO Events in New York City: NY I ❤️

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Today’s article comes from BrickNerd guest contributor Jon Lazar (aka 8 Bit Bricks on TikTok) who has attended several LEGO events in New York City on our behalf. He is a long-time AFOL and a member of ILUGNY.

A True New Yorker

LEGO seems to love NYC. I am a born and bred New Yorker, spending the majority of my life under the shadow of the New York City skyline. Being in such a populous area has afforded me many opportunities as an AFOL for almost two decades. I was an early retail employee at one of the first LEGO Brand retail stores in the US, helped with build events at the LEGO brand stores and FAO Schwartz, built for the World Maker Faire, represented Mindstorms at LEGO Live as a Mindstorms Community Partner, and partnered with The LEGO Group to build large scale displays at large events like New York Comic Con.

A few NYC-themed sets LEGO has produced not including IP or special event sets. Images via Brickset.

Over the course of a few months this year, The LEGO Group ran a half dozen events in New York City. While other cities may have had an event or maybe even two, no other city had as many as the Big Apple. What is it about New York that attracts The LEGO Group to run more events there than any place else in the United States? Why NYC? Let’s take a look at four specific reasons.

Art & Culture

New York City is a hub of the arts. With 145 museums, 41 Broadway theaters, Madison Square Garden, and many other places to take in all forms of the arts, there is no lack of places for in culture in New York City. In the past, LEGO animals have been seen at the Bronx Zoo and Nathan Sawaya’s Art of the Brick has been in the New York Hall of Science and the Discovery Center in Times Square. But when The LEGO Group wanted to create an art and play space, they built it in West Harlem.

BrickNerd was invited and sent ILUGNY member Nydia Perez when they unveiled the Fly Away Isles play space and mural uptown in Manhattan on World Play Day. She saw firsthand how they built an imaginative playground and art installation for children of all ages to explore and play in. The LEGO Group commissioned Hebru Bentley to capture “the creative optimism and boundless ideas of the children and turned their dreams into a reality” by taking the dreams and imagination of local children from the non-profit youth development organization The Brotherhood Sister Sol (BroSis) and bringing it to life for families to play together in.

Play space in West Harlem with art by Hebru Brantley commissioned by LEGO. Images via Nydia Perez.

Pop Culture

Pop culture has a strong presence in New York City. Times Square alone has the M&M Store, Hershey’s Chocolate World, a flagship Disney Store, a LINE Friends store, and was the former home to the flagship Toys R Us store – which may be gone, but the large Ferris wheel in the store will not be forgotten.

There are also a myriad of places to purchase any ephemera for any fandom you may have an interest in – Forbidden Planet for your toys and comics, Toy Tokyo for your anime and Japanese import needs, and Midtown Comics, the biggest brick-and-mortar comic book store in the USA. And we would be remiss if we ignored the three LEGO stores in New York City – including the flagship store that opened in 2021.

LEGO’s flagship store on 5th Avenue in NYC. Images via LEGO.

In addition to all the permanent pop culture centers in the city, there is an assortment of less permanent exhibitions that pass through the city on a regular basis. A dozen Comic and Anime Cons passed through the five boroughs of New York City over the course of 2022 – including New York Comic Con, the largest comic convention in the United States by attendance. In the past, LEGO was represented at the convention with large booths to show and unveil the latest LEGO had to offer, but recently they opted for something else.

On the final day of New York Comic Con this year, The LEGO Group launched the new season of Ninjago in the US. They partnered with IMDB and took over the Helen Mills Event Space and Theater and transformed it into a Ninjago experience. BrickNerd was invited to attend and sent me as a guest contributor.

The event had a red carpet to walk down, life-size statues of some of the protagonists, photo opportunities, and a theater premiering the first three episodes before they appeared on Netflix. By being in the shadow of the Jacob Javits Convention Center, LEGO and Ninjago were able to be part of the excitement of the weekend’s cultural zeitgeist.

Inside the Ninjago-themed event in NYC during Comic Con. Images via Jon Lazar.

Another cultural highlight of the holiday season each year is Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade. For a few hours on Thanksgiving morning, colorful floats and massive balloons make their way down Sixth Avenue to celebrate the festive season. The LEGO Group has been part of the parade several times, most recently with The Brick-Changer robotic turkey dragon float.

This monument to imagination travels two and a half miles through the streets of New York City to inspire and carry a rock group who perform on television in front of Macy’s flagship store on 34th Street.

The Brick-Changer float. image via LEGO.

Financial Center

When people think of finance, the first thing that comes to mind is Wall Street. The financial center of our country lives and breathes with the rise and fall of the numbers that move across the screens of lower Manhattan. It only makes sense that when a corporation wants to make a splash for partners or investors, they do it in Manhattan.

The International Toy Center was in the Flatiron district of New York City for almost a century before it closed. It housed the offices of many toy companies and was the central location of the International Toy Fair – along with the Jacob Javits Convention Center. Even with the Toy Center now a distant memory, the International Toy Fair continues on, and toy manufacturers continue to show off their wares for the coming year to buyers and the press. It was at some of these annual Toy Fairs that LEGO introduced the arrival of Star Wars and Marvel to the universe of building bricks that we have been enjoying for decades now – and led to the release of some highly desirable exclusive minifigures and sets that were handed out to announce the arrival of each of these lines.

Scenes from Toy Fair New York 2019. Images via Ars Technica.

Speaking of toys, Toys R Us was a also place that made us not want to grow up because if we did we couldn’t be Toys R Us kids. It was a sad day when our favorite childhood shopping emporium went away. Thankfully, it was resurrected this holiday season, and of course, it was unveiled in NYC before rolling out across the country.

On a rainy Thursday night in October, the Macy’s flagship store in Herald Square hosted the relaunch of the brand on the seventh floor. Bikes and trains and video games were all present once more, even if the biggest “toy store” of all time was reduced to being a store within a store.

Fashion

Each year, all eyes turn to New York Fashion Week, where fashionistas learn what they will be wearing the following season. Months later, all the haute couture can be found in stores up and down Fifth Avenue. For extreme fashion, there is always the Met Gala when celebrities wear the most outrageous apparel to get the most attention. But LEGO and fashion pop up in the most interesting of places.

For example, the windows of the H&M store on Fifth Avenue were decaled with LEGO logos on a day when Nerd-In-Chief Dave Schefcik happened to be walking by. He went inside to see what H&M may have in store for the LEGO fandom. LEGO Master Model Builder Christopher Steininger was in the store on the top floor running a build event to promote the launch of the new LEGO x H&M collaboration, where Dave was able to Play More.

The H&M on Fifth Ave had more LEGO branding than the LEGO Store that day. Images via Dave Schefcik.

What The LEGO Group Thinks of NYC

You can see that a lot happens in New York! (Not to mention LEGOLAND New York which just opened last year and is only a short drive away.) We reached out to Michael McNally, Senior Director of Brand Relations for the Americas for The LEGO Group, to get the company’s opinion on New York City. When we asked him what the appeal of NYC was, he told us that they choose “larger markets where there are a significant amount of news and earned media opportunities or markets where we have a flagship LEGO Store or cluster of LEGO Stores within driving distance,” and New York certainly falls into all of those categories.

When asked how LEGO determines what events to hold in New York, Michael said that many events are joint ideas with partners and that LEGO doesn’t “endeavor to be everywhere, nor do we have the resources to do so, so we’re very choiceful about when and how we activate.” But what does a successful NYC event look like for LEGO? Michael replied that “all events are designed to drive brand awareness and engagement. Some events have earned media objectives, others sometimes have sales objectives.”

With all of the events and activations the LEGO Group has run in New York City, the one that Michael singled out as the most unique was the time they “once landed the world’s largest LEGO Star Wars X-wing Starfighter in the middle of Times Square, which was quite a spectacle, albeit complex to pull off!”

Lifesize LEGO X-wing in Times Square from 2013, made from 5,335,200 bricks. Images via Jon Lazar and Business Insider.

This life-size accomplishment from a galaxy far, far away led me to ask a follow-up question: If The LEGO Group could do any activation in New York, without any limits, what would they do? Michael responded, “How cool would it be to recreate a 1:1 LEGO version of an iconic New York City landmark? How many LEGO bricks would it take to build a life-sized Empire State Building?”

As amazing a sight as that would be (however exciting yet impractical), we asked Michael a final question about what we could look forward to in New York from The LEGO Group in the future. All he would tell us was “You’ll just have to wait and see!”

Back in the New York Groove

New York City truly is a melting pot where you can find anything you want and simultaneously have no clue that all of these different aspects cohabitate in the same city. It has an energy and vibe that continually pulses like no other and could not be replicated easily. This magnetic pull keeps millions of New Yorkers here and draws millions more to visit and experience the Big Apple for themselves—LEGO included. There is always a special event happening somewhere in NYC that you might just happen upon when walking the streets, and I couldn’t imagine living anywhere else.

Why do you think LEGO keeps coming back to New York City? Let us know in the comments below!

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