Famous Nathan (9 page)

He had to pick himself up and start all over again. After the setback, he simply continued with his program of long workdays and the painstaking, week-by-week putting away of a few dollars. He didn't go out much. He lived a frugal life. The whole routine was difficult. Somehow he kept his spirits up under the strain. Nathan didn't broadcast the news, but inside, he nurtured a secret dream.

 

6

The Store

“I'll be there seven days a week, and I'm making five cents a frankfurter.” Nathan's Famous, ca. 1920, looking south on Seaside Walk.

HUMANS HAD BEEN
plundering the fat of Coney's land for a long time. Even before the coming of the Europeans, the Lenape and Carnarsie tribes mined Coney Island's shores for oyster shells to turn into strings of seawan, or wampum currency. In the modern era, one political boss after another milked the place as a cash cow.

The more things changed, though, the more they remained the same. Coney Island, as Nathan encountered it in 1914, was in the process of shedding one nickname, “Sodom by the Sea,” in favor of another, “America's Playground.” Coney Island could have been pried out of the hands of private interests and developed into a people's park. Instead, it was sliced and diced like a hog at a rendering plant.

Real reform was a few years down the line. The boardwalk was piecemeal: a section in front of Steeplechase Park, another farther to the east, all privately owned. A continuous oceanfront public promenade was as of yet just a proposal of a few progressives. Access to the ocean was still a hit-or-miss proposition, with large sections of the beach controlled and fenced off by private bathhouses, hotels, and beer gardens (including Feltman's).

The legality of all this was murky. Property titles along the beach were notoriously tangled, a state of affairs that allowed moneyed interests to elbow aside local leaseholders.

But in the early years of the twentieth century, a magical transformation happened. Somehow, despite pressures from all sides, Coney Island was in the process of stumbling into its golden age.

“It is blatant, it is cheap, it is the apotheosis of ridiculous, but it is something more,” author, screenwriter, and New York bon vivant Reginald Wright Kauffman wrote of Coney Island in 1909. “It is like Niagara Falls or the Grand Canyon or Yellowstone Park. It is a national playground and not to have seen it is not to have seen your own country.”

That summer of 1909, twenty million fun-seekers trekked to Coney Island. Among them was Sigmund Freud, on his first and only visit to the United States. The good doctor labeled America “a mistake, a giant mistake,” but claimed that Coney Island was the only thing about the country that interested him.

Credit for this has to be given to the growth of the American amusement park, which swept up the area in a sort of riot of the imagination.

The country's first roller coaster opened at Coney Island in 1884, a gravity-powered prototype that hit a kiddie-ride speed of six miles an hour. A year later, Sea Lion Park became the first enclosed amusement park in the country. With its sole popular attraction, the Water Chute, it lasted only until 1902. Other larger, more sophisticated establishments soon took its place.

Chief among them, the holy trinity of Coney's golden age, the Big Three: Steeplechase Park, Luna Park, and Dreamland.

They came on in quick order. Brilliant entrepreneur George Tilyou founded Steeplechase in 1897, spending the next years constantly enlarging and refining its attractions. Luna Park opened in 1903, taking over and enlarging the footprint of the original Sea Lion Park (and, earlier, the site of the famed Elephant Hotel). A year later, the last and arguably trippiest of the Big Three, Dreamland, completed the classic Coney Island trifecta. Together, they formed a million-lightbulb “Electric Eden,” the brilliantly garish phantasmagoria that newly arriving European immigrants could glimpse from far out at sea.

By 1914, in his post cutting rolls and waiting tables at Feltman's, Nathan was square in the middle of the action. Dreamland burned in spring 1911, but Luna Park (“The Heart of Coney Island”) faced Feltman's on Surf Avenue. Just past the amusement park loomed the 125-foot Iron Tower, imported from Philadelphia's Centennial International Exhibition of 1876 and equipped with steam elevators. Seven blocks to the west was George Tilyou's new, updated Steeplechase, easily reached by that alleyway of broken dreams, the busy, attraction-packed lane called the Bowery.

Working at Feltman's was like living at a three-ring circus. Across the street at Luna Park, actual premature infants inhabited a collection of baby incubators. Igorrote tribespeople from the Philippines were put on display like show animals. Freaks, geeks, and daredevils drew crowds at the sideshows of the Bowery.

Some of the booths in the Bowery's “Little Cairo” section offered erotic dancers, tame by modern standards, daring for the day. In fact, sex was the secret allure that permeated the whole area. Coney Island was to some extent extraterritorial, a free-fire zone where the rules and restrictive customs of society were loosened. The genders mixed. A visitor to Steeplechase, for example, might be thrown against a stranger of the opposite sex in the Barrel of Fun, the Human Pool Table, or the Whirlpool. Coney Island was promiscuous in a way even the overcrowded streets of Manhattan's Lower East Side were not.

Beyond the parks lay the sparkling Atlantic. Doctors had only recently begun touting the health benefits of ocean bathing. Women's bathing suits covered torsos and extremities with a vengeance, but because they dared to show bodily forms, they were considered risqué. Men's topless bathing remained taboo. Even children were swaddled within an inch of their lives. Yet the sensuality of bathing with thousands of strangers remained.

Build it, and they will come. The number of visitors to Coney Island rose each season, from tens of thousands in the 1870s to the early twentieth century when on summer weekends the daily crowds routinely topped one hundred thousand. Every year, Feltman's served more than a million customers, pumping out its shore dinners and dachshund sandwiches by the thousands.

More than a physical reality, Coney Island began to develop a dream reality, too. What was once a deserted, sandy wasteland now situated itself in the world's imagination like an intoxicating mirage. Postcards documenting seaside visits poured out in streams, and then rivers, and then floods. Coney Island became the most postcarded venue in the world and, even to this day, in history. On a single day in September 1906, two hundred thousand postcards were mailed from the resort town.

Yes, Coney Island was a head-turning kind of place, and Nathan's head spun along with everyone else's. But where others saw mere amusement, Nathan focused on opportunity. He saw the millions funneling through gates of Culver Terminal and the nearby Sea Beach line. A thought naturally occurred: a few pennies, nickels, and dimes from each one of those visitors could add up to something big. The two ends of the retail spectrum are volume and exclusivity. Coney had the one to such a degree that it didn't need the other.

Through his job as a Feltman's waiter, a few of those nickels and dimes had already found their way into the pocket of Nathan Handwerker. Bank failures notwithstanding, in two seasons at Coney Island, 1914 and 1915, and during four years while working at Manhattan luncheonettes, Nathan had managed to save $300.

In the summer of 1916, he took a rare day off. A coworker at the Busy Bee named Sam (again, last name lost to history) ran the waffle-and-ice-cream concession at the luncheonette. The two men spoke of going into business for themselves. That day, Nathan suggested a scouting trip.

“Sam, let's go out to Coney Island.”

Saturday. Nathan still worked at Feltman's. He should have been in a waiter's apron that day. His bosses could have found him out. But it was easy to remain anonymous amid the numberless throng along Surf Avenue. The season was just beginning. He and Sam joined the vast parade of humanity. The first rental property they looked at was a barbershop.

“They asked $150 [per month] for the place, for just a piece of counter,” Nathan recalled. “So I'm hesitating. I didn't like it. There's nothing there—no water, no sinks, nothing, no sewer.”

While Sam remained behind, negotiating with the barbershop's owners, Nathan returned to the bustle of the street to look around. He stood in the middle of the block between Stillwell Avenue and Fifteenth Street. Looking up and down the block, he noticed a building on the south side of Surf Avenue that stood out from a small lane then called Seaside Walk.

The lane would soon be renamed after a local bottler of soda water, Philip Schweickert Sr. At some point during the succeeding years, the
c
was dropped, and the street sign became “Schweikerts Walk.” (The good news is that you have a small slice of Coney Island named after you—the bad news is that the New York City Department of Transportation is going to forever misspell your name.) Even in the mid-1920s, the lane was still sometimes referred to by its original appellation of Seaside Walk.

The counter offered for lease was tiny, just five feet long on Surf and another eight feet deep on Schweikerts. Nathan noticed that some structures on the street seemed to disappear amid the crowds of people. But he could see the little corner building from the middle of the block.

He returned to the barbershop and summoned his erstwhile partner. “See that place? There's a corner there. Let's go and see.”

A man dozed inside the store's cramped interior. Sam approached him, and the two of them spoke German, of which Nathan understood a little. The proprietor wanted $300 for a lease on the premises.

“Let's take it,” Nathan said.

“You want to take it?” Sam responded, doubtful.

“You want to be a partner, I'll take you. And if you don't want it, I'll take it myself.”

Nathan and Sam signed the contract for the tiny counter space at Surf and Schweikerts. The landlord accepted $150 from each of them.

July 1916. An empire was born. Like a lot of great empires, it ran into trouble right from the start.

*   *   *

Nathan always referred to the Surf Avenue location as “the store.” It wasn't called “Nathan's Famous” then. It wasn't called anything. It was just two guys, Nathan and Sam, selling frankfurters for a dime, with lemonade and orangeade going for a nickel.

In the beginning, what would become an empire was literally built on sand. The store had no real foundation. Nathan laid wooden two-by-fours directly on the dun-colored Coney Island beach sand and then placed planks over them. Proper concrete flooring remained years in the future.

The foot traffic along Coney Island's main stem was certainly there. Summer visitors flocked to the amusements, vaudeville houses, and bathhouses along Surf and the Bowery. Feltman's, three blocks to the east of Nathan's new store, hosted over two million customers that year.

But something didn't add up. Nathan and Sam took in a grand total of sixty dollars on their first weekend, Saturday through Sunday. It wasn't enough to keep the place afloat. The competition was fierce. Nathan could look over to the nearby intersection of Surf and Stillwell and count four restaurants, one on each corner, including an outlet of the popular Nedick's chain. It specialized in frankfurters, which sold for ten cents and came on a toasted bun.

“Sam, let's make them a nickel,” Nathan suggested, referring to the store's own dime frankfurters. He had years of experience at Manhattan luncheonettes, moving five-cent dogs in the hundreds per day. Why not at Coney?

“Nathan, I'm afraid,” Sam responded. “They're going to put us out of business. You'll be the only one selling them for a nickel.”

Nathan silently cursed. He sensed his partner was getting cold feet all around.

“My fiancée gave me an argument,” Sam said. “She asked me, ‘Why did you get a place?'”

“Well, what do you want to do?” Nathan asked.

“Pay me off.”

Nathan didn't have to think too long. “Okay, I'll pay you off, $150. Good enough?”

Sam agreed. “But you have to bring the money. You got to bring on Thursday the money.”

Nathan had exhausted his savings on his half of the lease and purchasing equipment and inventory. How was he going to come up with $150 in four days? He reached out for a loan to his boss as Max's Busy Bee, who had just opened up another restaurant at 97 Spring, a cafeteria-style eatery next door to the luncheonette. The loan was late in coming.

“So, Thursday, no money,” Nathan recalled. “Friday, no money. Saturday, still.” He was in danger of losing his investment in the little Surf Avenue storefront.

Sam came to him that weekend. “You didn't keep your word.” But the next day, the loan came through, and the buyout was settled. Nathan no longer had a partner. He was the sole leaseholder of a thin slice of Coney Island commercial real estate, a store that so far had failed to pay for itself.