“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.
Seventy percent of new start-up restaurants fail, a ratio that has held constant over the years. Nathan was desperate to succeed. “When I came to this country, I had nothing,” he said, looking back at this period. “I knew that if I didn’t really work hard and do something, I couldn’t survive.”
His first idea was to expand his product line. He knew of a store on Broome Street in Manhattan, a block south of the Busy Bee, that sold malteds, candy, and cigarettes. The place had a machine for sale, used and cheap, a mixer for making malted milkshakes. He bought the rig and then went farther downtown to Delancey Street, where he knew of a firm called I. Lefkowitz & Son, a syrup manufacturer.
Nathan had in mind to create the finest malted in New York. He purchased a half gallon of chocolate syrup and a half gallon of vanilla, the latter to “open up the flavor of the malted.” Enlisting his older brother Joseph, he lugged the machine and the stock of ingredients out to Brooklyn and the little cubbyhole store on Surf Avenue.
“Three cents for a malted, five cents for a malted with ice cream, six cents for a little ice before the machine mixes it up. I had the best malted to buy.”
He wasn’t finished. In Coney, he bought another “little machine,” one that would grind a whole pineapple to make juice. “Two cents for a pineapple juice. Fresh made, like the orangeade and lemonade.”
It didn’t matter. Nothing did the trick. He was still selling frankfurters for a dime and still grossing no more than sixty or seventy dollars on summer weekends, not enough to keep him in business.
There were other difficulties. Joseph Handwerker had been working as a peddler, and Nathan wanted to give his brother a leg up. He brought him out to the struggling Coney Island store.
“‘Come, want to help me?’ I says to him. ‘Come on.’ I didn’t tell him anything. I didn’t promise to make him a partner. I thought that I’ll see how it works out.”
He first gave Joseph the deceptively simple job of making lemonade, something that, by that time, Nathan had been doing nearly every day for four years. Joseph might not have yet grasped the fact that in Nathan Handwerker’s world, there was a right way and wrong way of doing everything—at least, everything within the microcosm of a luncheonette.
“I told him what to do to make lemonade. I tell him how to make it, and he makes it another way. The way he makes it, the sugar wouldn’t melt. Because if you put the lemon and the sugar in together, the sugar gets hardened up. First you got to put the lemon, then half water, then sugar, then spoon, mix it. Four gallons a night to make.”
How hard could it be? But perhaps the issue was a younger brother telling an older brother what to do. A disagreement ensued, escalating into a full-blown argument, with the two siblings yelling at each other. The passersby on Surf Avenue might have thought it was just one more Coney Island sideshow. The quarrel culminated in Joseph cursing Nathan out and spitting in his face.
“He cursed me the devil to my mother in Yiddish,” Nathan recalled. Since the two were brothers, it was an odd oath. “I say to him, ‘Why are you cursing your own mother?’”
The first experiment in Handwerker nepotism ended in disaster.
“I didn’t say nothing to him after that,” Nathan recalled. “At night, I paid him off. And I says, ‘Joe, I’m sorry. I didn’t want to fight with you. Business is business, and I can’t do it. You’re not for me. I told you what to do, you didn’t do the right thing, you didn’t listen to me, and you’re not for me.’ I didn’t hire him anymore.”
Nathan was a tough boss from the start. At the young age of twenty-four, he had already developed an uncompromising management style. Business was business, as he said, and in business dealings, he would forever be a hard soul. Early poverty in Galicia had broken many people, but with Nathan, it seemed hardship had only tempered his steel.
There were two elements for success in business. There was toughness on the one hand and on the other a taste for calculated risk. Joseph Handwerker was content to work a pushcart. (“If you want to be a peddler, be a peddler,” Nathan said when showing his older brother the door.) On a scale of daring, perhaps opening a store on Coney was not extreme, but within the context of Nathan’s hard-scrabbling, dog-eat-dog immigrant world, it was a gamble.
As was his next move, lowering the price of his signature product to a nickel. He had proposed this plan to his first partner, Sam. Now, with no partner to object, Nathan forged ahead. Frankfurters would be five cents instead of ten, and two cents for lemonade.
Sam had originally objected to the idea out of fear that the Coney Island bosses wouldn’t welcome a threat to the status quo. Nathan himself remembered worrying about the boldness of his new business plan: “I was afraid of the politicians trying to close me out for underselling everybody. But I took a chance. I didn’t give up.”
Were his fears justified? Would there be interference from Coney Island bigwigs, angry over competition for such powerful establishments as Feltman’s? Ever since its beginnings in the nineteenth century, the resort town had always been rife with cronyism. The audacious newcomer with his tiny five feet of storefront would be underpricing the big boys. Nathan didn’t know how such a move would go down in the tightly knit business community around him. He had learned during his childhood in Galicia to fear the arbitrary moves of those in authority. The notorious Habsburg bureaucracy had taught him well.
But as he waited for the other shoe to drop, it never did. “Nobody ever bothered me about it,” Nathan said later.
No one interfered, and there’s some question if anyone in power even noticed the little store on the corner of Surf Avenue and Schweikerts Walk. Who did notice—in droves—were the working people who came on holiday to Coney Island. Many of them were common laborers, visitors who had to count their pennies and well knew the difference between a dime and a nickel. They recognized a bargain when they saw one.
The first weekend Nathan dropped the price of a hot dog, he more than quadrupled his business. He took in $260 as opposed to the $50 or $60 he had been grossing before. He had discovered a price point, as modern business schools would term it, and he had done so instinctively, without a day’s worth of education and indeed without even being able to read or write.
He was on his way. Nathan didn’t need to be told twice, and he didn’t hesitate, either, but plunged in with both feet. It was another business lesson he grasped intuitively. Recognize a win when one comes along.
“I go to my boss on Spring Street,” he recalled. “I say to him, ‘I’ll give you a week’s notice until you get somebody.’ Instead of going to Coney just for the weekend, I’ll be there seven days a week, and I’m making five cents a frankfurter.”