• The Washington Post , Wednesday, December 20, 2006 11:45 AM

On a recent Saturday, a 40-minute line stretched to the end of a block outside American Girl Place on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan. It's one of three American Girl stores in the country--the others are in Chicago and Los Angeles--that have become a tourist destination for girls and their parents.

American Girl markets a line of historical dolls that hail from Colonial, pioneer and World War II periods, among others. The dolls are obsessed, in various incarnations, with horses, reading and friends--not boys. The price for a basic doll and introductory book is $87.

Employees in the purple-walled emporium speak of it breathlessly as an "experience," not a store. It contains a doll hair salon, a cafe that serves high tea to girls and dolls, a small Broadway-quality theater with plays about dolls and a photo studio ready to immortalize the duo of doll and girl.

The brand, a subsidiary of Mattel, rang up sales of $436 million in 2005 by being marketed as a preserve of innocence and as a place for female bonding and child-scale history.

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