Children's changing interests, weather make selling sleds an uphill battle

These are desperate times for sledding and its urban fans.

The scant inch of snow that greeted New Yorkers on a recent Sunday morning drove them to city parks, clutching fleets of brightly colored plastic sleds, eager to catch any snow for the few hours that it lasted.

"We wanted to get out today because you never know when you'll get more snow," said Paul Model, who was holding an inflatable inner tube sled for his son, Corey, 9. He gestured to the fences still blocking the Central Park hills around East 72nd Street, which are usually replaced with bales of hay in time for sledding season. "This caught the Parks Department by surprise."

Any New Yorker who didn't already have a sled stashed in the closet that morning might have been out of luck: Toy retailers, both in the city and across the country, have largely pushed sleds and toboggans off their shelves and out of their catalog pages. Sales of winter sports toys, a category that includes most sleds, which are not tracked separately, have been dropping since 2004; in 2006 they were down 40 percent from 2005, to $29 million from $49 million, according to the NPD Group, a market research firm.

Once the quintessential under-the-Christmas-tree gift, wooden sleds have largely disappeared from the holiday shopping mix, victims of warmer weather (which makes scooters more appealing) and the changing taste of children (who might prefer a Sony PlayStation or Nintendo Wii).

The remaining manufacturers market them mainly as nostalgia items or serious sporting equipment designed for ski slopes. And increasingly, the sleds that do show up in toy and sporting goods stores are the disposable plastic kind, impulsively bought and easily forgotten on the local hill at the end of the day.

"The wooden sled is dying in the city," said Barry Kingham, a lawyer who lives on the Upper East Side and accompanied his 8-year-old son, Will, on a scooter ride in Central Park on a crisp Saturday last month. "I grew up here in the '50s, and there was lots of snow," Kingham said. Now, "even if it snows, it melts faster."

The weather does seem to be a major culprit in the sled's demise. Manufacturers say that national retailers like Wal-Mart and Target have decreased floor space for their products over the past several years, and that the late arrival of cold weather in the Northeast in recent years has pushed their sales window past the lucrative holiday shopping season. Last winter, the first snowflakes in New York City did not arrive until Jan. 10 — the latest in 129 years and well after the holidays.