Famous Nathan (17 page)

Nathan's sons remember the day well. “It was extraordinary, the mobs that showed up,” Sol said. “I was standing there watching all of this.”

Murray Handwerker, who was twelve years old at the time, recalled, “People lined up from Stillwell down Surf Avenue, down Schweikerts Walk, down to the boardwalk, and under the boardwalk.”

Of course, all the mugs containing that free beer had the logo of Nathan's Famous emblazoned on them. The customers were encouraged to take them home as souvenirs, so the stunt had promotional value.

As Prohibition staggered to an end, the country was deeply mired in the Great Depression. In 1933, the worst year of the economic crisis, four thousand banks failed across the United States. Eight million members of the labor force—one out of every four—were out of work. Thirty-two thousand businesses went bankrupt. Included in that number, Coney Island's Luna Park, which filed for bankruptcy, closed, reopened, and then continued a long slide toward its demise.

Likewise, Feltman's Ocean Pavilion, just a few blocks east of the store, experienced a steady decline. Its relatively formal dining rooms, where you could not enter without a jacket and which featured white tablecloths, were out of step with the increasingly populist times.

“Visitors to Coney Island could barely afford the subway ride, let alone a sit-down meal at Feltman's,” writes Coney Island historian Jeffrey Stanton.

But expense wasn't the only issue. Speed of service was another. The pace of modern life picked up as the automobile, the telephone, and the radio became more prevalent and popular. Feltman's tony Ocean Pavilion was never a grab joint the way Nathan's Famous was. At some unheralded point in the 1930s, Nathan surpassed his former place of employment, on the way up as the other was on its way down. Rising anti-German sentiment contributed to Feltman's demise.

During the dark economic climate, Nathan's Famous remained a symbol of hope, a downscale one, perhaps, but durable. The famously recognizable billboards that loomed over Surf Avenue stayed brightly lit at night. Nathan's business flourished during the Roaring Twenties. Now in the depressed thirties, the store not only survived, it prospered. It was uncanny. As Nathan watched the rest of the country and then the rest of the world go down the tubes, he remained buoyant.

“My business started to get doubled up during the Depression, twice as big, bigger and bigger and bigger every year.”

It turned out the nickel dog was recession proof. Five cents in 1933 had the buying power of ninety cents in today's economy. It was still a stretch, but many of the offerings at other restaurants were out of reach for the impoverished populace.

Nathan's son Sol, who witnessed it all as a young boy, paints a heartbreaking picture. “They would come down with families, and the family would share one hot dog with some french fries. They couldn't go to a regular restaurant, which of course was much higher in price. But they could go to Nathan's. So in a sense, it helped people by encouraging them to come and eat good food at a very, very low price.”

Throughout the decade, in bad times and in worse times, the fundamental formula never changed. The holy trinity of Nathan's success—speed of service, quality of food, and low price—had become a religion. Even as the price of his supplies rose, Nathan doggedly maintained the nickel frankfurter. It amounted almost to a superstition with him. The five-cent dog had made him rich. Futzing with the price might lead to problems. It would take a major catastrophe of worldwide proportions to move him away from his magic number.

 

11

The Count

“It was just a single restaurant, but the place was run with procedures that rivaled IBM.” Nathan's 1925 bank ledger.

BACK IN 1917,
the year after Nathan opened the store, Kenneth F. Sutherland Jr. got himself named the district leader of local Brooklyn Democrats. The son of a machine boss from nearby Gravesend, Sutherland gradually rose in the party ranks to wield nearly as much influence as his father. Familiarly addressed as “Senator” after he served a stint as a state congressman, he became Nathan's longtime political ally.

Sutherland's other nickname was “Little Corporal,” a nod to both his stature and his Napoleonic tendencies. He enjoyed the kind of power and reach that could make someone a governor of the state. Coney Island had always followed the “big man” model of politics. The crescent of sandy seaside wasteland had been a prize fought after by a lot of competing interests, and the battles had been close and bitter ever since the dawn of the nineteenth century. Land grabs, graft, and backroom deals were the norm.

Twentieth-century bosses couldn't possibly compete with the corruption of the legendary John Y. McKane, the post–Civil War overlord of Coney Island who once publicly made the forthright claim that “houses of prostitution are a necessity” in any seaside resort. One of McKane's henchmen was Kenneth F. Sutherland Sr., a.k.a. “the Czar of Coney Island,” who served a stretch in Sing Sing for election fraud. He died in 1910 after being “horribly mangled” in a subway accident.

The son inherited the sins of the father. By the 1930s, Kenny Sutherland Jr. had Coney Island firmly in his grip. Nathan was right there beside him. The immigrant from Habsburg Galicia well understood the big-man style of power. He formed an easy association with Sutherland, becoming, according to one observer, “as close as cousins.” The two of them essentially came up together, the one using successive terms as state assemblyman and senator to cement his power, the other witnessing his business succeed beyond his wildest dreams.

Food was Nathan's passport to influence. He joined the Coney Island Chamber of Commerce, eventually serving as president. Courtesy of his good friend Max Kamiel, Nathan also became an initiate in the mysteries of Freemasonry. When the political powers of the Sixteenth District flocked together, Nathan always catered the event.

Every year, the political elites of the area went away for a weeklong Catskills retreat. The so-called Monroe Boys (named after Monroe, New York, where they sometimes gathered), also referred to as the “summer group,” included insiders and old-timers: councilmen, the borough president, judges, and congressional representatives and their minions from all over Brooklyn, but especially from Coney Island. Backs were slapped, hands were glad-handed, and backroom deals were hammered out.

“They were all there, the biggest of the big, and they would really let their hair down,” remembered summer group member Pat Auletta, father of writer Ken Auletta and lifelong Coney Island resident (he was one of a series of people to claim the title of “mayor of Coney Island”).

The annual retreat centered around eating, drinking, and playing cards. The big shots were inveterate practical jokers. Disdaining the mundane idea of giving a hot foot, they would ignite a whole fire underneath the bed of a napping fellow Monroe Boy. They once had one of their group, a Brooklyn judge, falsely arrested and put in jail, supposedly for stealing a car.

Every year for the event, Nathan would supply hot dogs, hamburgers, and perhaps a side of beef. He would shuttle back and forth from the store to the Catskills retreat, bringing supplies for the hungry politicos. The obvious success of his business and its geographic centrality in the Coney Island landscape—the store was hard to miss with its huge, busy billboards blaring out above Surf Avenue—established Nathan Handwerker's local bona fides.

Eventually, courtesy of his achievements and his participation in such insider rituals as the summer group retreat, Nathan took his place as an integral member of the Brooklyn establishment. In contemporary political parlance, he was a job creator. The store had become a major local employer, “the General Motors of Coney Island,” in the words of one insider.

Back when he started out, Nathan had worried about interference from local power brokers for daring to offer a nickel frankfurter. He came to understood that in America as in Europe, good connections made for good business. The Jewish immigrant, a perennial outsider, had arrived at last, if only as a caterer.

His association with Sutherland paid off in concrete ways. With the rise of car culture in America, Nathan's Famous depended less on foot traffic and more and more on customers who arrived by automobile. Lack of parking was a perpetual concern. Plus there was the pesky problem of a pair of fire hydrants along the curb. They interfered with the vehicles that piled up two or three deep during busy periods.

Might it be possible to have the hydrants moved farther down Surf Avenue? And while you are at it, could the bus stop in front of the store please be placed somewhere else? That would give Nathan's Famous clear street frontage to work with. An expensive proposition, digging up the water lines and relocating the fireplugs. And people always screamed when their bus stop was displaced. But Kenny Sutherland got it all done for his good friend Nathan.

Favors flowed the other way, too. Pat Auletta said that Sutherland was definitely an authority figure for Nathan. “If Kenny Sutherland told him to jump off the Empire State Building, I think Nathan would have done just that,” Auletta recalled.

Sutherland might have been at the apex of the Coney Island food chain, but he still couldn't be everywhere at once. He relied on the local constabulary as the physical expression of his power. True to form, the big man granted Nathan's Famous the incredible benefit of having its very own cops.

Veteran manager Jay Cohen: “Nathan's being located as it was, and as many people that visited the place in the summer months, it required a lot of police to cover the area for crime, for pickpockets, and things of that sort.”

Friendly police officers were valuable for what they could do—crime suppression, traffic control, breaking up fights—but also for what they would not do—write parking tickets.

“If a car was double-parked, the driver ran across the street and picked up three hot dogs, a bag of french fries, and a soda,” Cohen said. “He'd go back to his car and eat. As management, we did not want him to be harassed by the police writing him up with summonses.”

Courtesy of Nathan's good standing with the powers that be, two police officers were assigned to the sidewalks in front of the store at all times. Each cop worked an eight-hour shift, and there were three shifts per day. Joe Handwerker usually handled the greasing of palms, allowing Nathan to stay out of the fray.

“At the end of the week, every one of those men—which makes six tours, because there's two men each—would get two dollars per day as their tip to make sure that they stayed on the premises,” Jay Cohen said. “If the management had trouble with a rowdy customer, a policeman would step in. Of course, he would take your side, because after all, in his own way, he was on your payroll.”

The baksheesh didn't stop with the beat cops. The mounted police would also receive what Cohen referred to as “our two-dollar-a-day retainer.” At the end of every season, the lieutenants and captains at the local precinct house also got their due. Emissaries from the store would visit and introduce themselves. Envelopes changed hands. Whenever a new police chief took office, Joe Handwerker made a pilgrimage with a paper bag full of money.

“It was a known fact that Nathan's was good people to the police department,” Cohen said.

Good in more ways than one. Eventually, Nathan actually created a second break room at the store, next to the employees' break room but reserved for the exclusive use of the police. The employees' dining room also saw a lot of blue uniforms.

“They knew that they could come in the back door and eat,” Cohen said. “There was many a day when the employees' dining room had twenty to thirty policemen eating there. Eighty percent of them never paid. That's the way Nathan ran the business.”

At times, the cops caused problems instead of heading them off. “At four o'clock in the morning, we had to stop selling beer,” recalled Hy Brown. “We had to turn off the spigots on a Friday night at four and on Saturday night at three. We had a lot of drunken cops there, all off duty.”

Brown remembered one cop practically assaulting him during an early-morning confrontation. “He took a scissors and cut off my tie. He wanted beer, but we had turned off the air inside, so we couldn't draw beer outside.”

The demanding cop took out his service pistol and laid it atop the counter. What could Hy Brown do? “I gave him beer.”

Arguments and fistfights, yes. But because of the highly visible presence of the police on the block, the store was never robbed. Except once.

Nathan had gotten his hands on a $1,000 bill that someone came to him to cash. He knew the holder of the bill, a local resident, and the holder knew that Nathan's Famous was an all-cash business. The bank wouldn't take such a large denomination, so Nathan was the next best bet.

A circulating thousand-dollar bill was a very rare thing. To collectors, they were worth more than face value. Their official use would soon be suspended, since electronic banking transfers were becoming the norm, and such big bills were being used primarily by organized crime.