Famous Nathan (29 page)

Coney was the kind of sprawling, chaotic, untidy realm that an order-obsessed fanatic like Moses was born to hate. “His pathological dislike of the Coney Island amusement community was obvious,” writes preeminent Coney Island commentator and historian Charles Denson, a longtime resident.

We don't have to take anyone else's word for it. In his 1937 master plan for the city's public beaches,
The Improvement of Coney Island, Rockaway and South Beaches,
Moses described the history of Coney as “sad,” adding, “There is no use bemoaning the end of the old Coney Island fabled in song and story. The important thing is not to proceed in the mistaken belief that it can be revived.” He came not to praise Coney but to bury it.

Square in the path of the Robert Moses juggernaut stood a little five-foot-three luncheonette man. Though Nathan had solid connections to the Democratic political elite of Brooklyn, he could not match Moses in clout. But he tried. To promote a hands-off “let Coney be Coney” philosophy, he used his own high standing in the community, plus Murray's inherited position as president of the Coney Island Chamber of Commerce.

Fire had long been Coney Island's accidental development strategy of choice. Flames leveled various parts of the resort town with stunning regularity: the fabled Elephant Hotel burned in 1896, followed by Steeplechase Park in 1907, Dreamland in 1911, and a widespread conflagration in 1932 that took out a huge section off Surf between Twenty-First and Twenty-Fifth Streets. Amid all these fiery assaults, Nathan's Famous managed to remain unscathed. Perhaps angels covered it up.

The Luna Park blaze in 1944 (actually two fires, separated by a few weeks) and another in 1946 managed to put the amusement park permanently out of its long-faded misery. The fires provided an opening for Moses. La Guardia named him chairman of the Mayor's Committee on Slum Clearance in 1949. Using Title I money from the federal Housing Act of 1949, he took control of the burned-out Luna Park site for residential development. Denson, in his book
Coney Island: Lost and Found,
judges that the Luna Park landgrab trimmed the resort town's amusement zone by a third.

Other Moses initiatives lopped off whole sections of beach by unilaterally straightening the boardwalk; they also moved the New York Aquarium from Castle Clinton in Manhattan to the old Dreamland site on West Eighth Street and chipped away at huge blocks of land using urban renewal, civil forfeiture, and eminent domain policies. The result was that Coney Island was squeezed from both the east and west, caught in a vise devised by Robert Moses.

“I didn't want to see Coney Island lose its entertainment features and amusement zone,” Murray would later say in an interview with Denson, referring to the resort town's qualities that Moses had dismissed as being mere “summer exploitation.”

“Moses was trying to get the zoning changed, to take over Coney Island like he did Jones Beach on Long Island,” Murray said. “Moses wanted all the private industry out. He wanted to make everything south of Surf Avenue into a public beach. Moses wanted Coney Island for himself … That's why I fought him tooth and nail. He was against private industry, and he didn't want amusements. Little by little, he was trying to destroy Coney Island.”

The Handwerkers, father and sons, were engaged in a losing battle. “Moses has shrunk the amusement center of Coney Island considerably,” Nathan said publicly. “But never, and I mean never, will he shrink Nathan's frankfurters.”

In hindsight, it is easy to trace how Moses's remaking of the area precipitated its decline. Rather than the safe and serene middle-class residential enclave that the parks commissioner envisioned, Coney Island tumbled into blight. His good intentions paved the way to a seaside hell. The process happened gradually. By the end, the transformations engineered by Robert Moses threatened to take Nathan's Famous down along with the rest of the neighborhood.

*   *   *

As Moses made war on the store and everything it stood for externally, internal forces were also ripping Nathan's Famous apart. In the battle between Sol and Murray over the future of the business, Nathan often found himself standing in the middle. If he had known the phrase, he would have been wailing the words of Rodney King: “Can't we all get along?”

“When Murray came home from the army,” his wife, Dorothy, recalled, “Murray said to Nathan, ‘You know I really feel that we can't just have one store. People are moving out to Long Island, out to the suburbs. All the vets are coming home. We should think of expanding.'”

Nathan refused to accept the whole concept.
I have one chair,
he would say,
what do I need with more? You can't sit your ass in two chairs. Can I eat with two spoons? I have one car, why should I have two or three
?

“Times have changed,” Murray would respond. “You've got to grow, and you've got to do different things.”

“Nathan never wanted to expand at all,” noted Jay Cohen. “He only wanted to operate something that he could watch. Even in the fifties, that man was in that store from seven, eight o'clock in the morning until five or six o'clock in the evening. He saw every delivery of food that came in. He checked it personally. He checked every truck.”

The argument over expansion continued for months, years. Even in disagreeing with Murray, Nathan managed to express his true motivation: love and concern for his sons. “Have one store,” he told them. “It's enough for all the families. You'll all earn a living.”

The crux of the matter rested on more than just the simple question of developing more stores. Sol and Murray differed fundamentally on how to expand. Murray had been exposed to a whole range of worldly possibilities in France during the war, and aspired to a more cultured existence than being the owner of “a hot dog stand,” as Dr. Eimicke referred to the store.

In the lunch rush pandemonium of Coney Island, Murray would find himself envisioning a real, sit-down restaurant, less frenetic than the store. Murray's dreams translated, in terms of Nathan's Famous, to a quite specific approach to expansion: larger restaurants, bigger menus, more formal dining.

In the opposite corner, wearing the white trunks … Sol, too, thought Nathan's Famous should expand, in spite of his father's resistance. But he wanted to take a path different from Murray's. His vision was a chain of small stores with limited menus, each modeled after the original at Coney Island, each based upon the business model that had made Nathan's Famous so successful in the first place. Why futz with a winning formula? The highest-quality food, the fastest service, the most affordable prices. That was the way to go.

In other words, the McDonald's model. Although some might argue Ray Kroc stinted on that “highest-quality food” element, beginning in the midfifties, he would take the fundamental formula of Nathan's Famous and march on to global domination. He did it by repeating the same mantra that Nathan had lived by for decades.

“If I had a brick for every time I've repeated the phrase ‘Quality, Service, Cleanliness, and Value,''' said Kroc, “I think I'd probably be able to bridge the Atlantic Ocean with them.”

“In 1954, [Ray Kroc] visited a restaurant in San Bernardino, California,” states the biography on the official McDonald's website. “There he found a small but successful restaurant run by brothers Dick and Mac McDonald, and was stunned by the effectiveness of their operation. They produced a limited menu, concentrating on just a few items—burgers, fries and beverages—which allowed them to focus on quality and quick service.”

Small stores, small menu. This was, essentially, the same argument Sol advanced to his father and brother during precisely the same period, only at the opposite end of the country from San Bernardino. McDonald's Famous. It was, for all of its faults and compromises, a business strategy very much in tune with the times. Several factors, including car culture, women's entry into the workforce, and the increased tempo of life served to render fast food the wave of the future.

Back then, nothing looked so certain. Murray was peering into his crystal ball and seeing the same changes as Sol—the move to the suburbs, increased mobility, a growing demographic—but drawing different conclusions. To him, the changes to come meant people would want more choices, more formality, and a more settled restaurant experience.

“Opening gigantic stores, the way that Murray wanted to open them, took a tremendous investment,” said longtime Nathan's Famous manager Hy Brown. “It was all stainless-steel equipment that wasn't movable. There was a big stainless-steel counter, and you couldn't do much with it after it was built, so you couldn't make changes.”

“I opposed the idea of expanding based on building big stores,” Sol recalled. “I thought we should build with small stores, more like a McDonald's today, more like a Burger King, with a more limited menu. We'd be able to control things better in terms of personnel and the products that we'd be serving.”

The small-is-beautiful versus big-is-better debate wasn't the sole issue separating Murray and Sol. And it wasn't the only element contributing to tension at the store. Take two brothers with different outlooks, values, and personalities and then add in a strong-willed father with very distinct and determined ideas of his own, and there was little wonder that the atmosphere around Surf and Stillwell became increasingly fraught.

“Nathan would be very upset if [Sol and Murray] weren't there every day, because he expected them to be like him,” recalled Jay Cohen. “It was very obvious to me that there was no way in hell that was going to happen. I never saw them last very long together. It was my estimation that they would never want to run that organization.”

During this period, Nathan resurrected an old witticism from the past, one that he had tried out on Mayor La Guardia during the first strike at the store.

“I wish I had a merry-go-round,” Nathan told the store's manager Hy Brown.

“Why?” responded Brown, willing to play the straight man.

“Because the carousel horses don't eat and don't shit and don't talk back to their father.”

Nathan tied himself in knots trying to solve the problem of his warring sons. He might not have had the psychological acumen to deal with it. His experience with his own battling brothers proved the stubborn difficulties of sibling rivalry. He tried the strategy of giving his boys separate responsibilities, with Murray taking on the store operations and Sol handling purchasing, insurance, and marketing. But the effort didn't work. Literally and figuratively, the brothers kept stepping on each other's toes.

“I think it broke his heart, the fight between Murray and Sol,” said Hygrade rep Paul Berlly. “He didn't understand. He thought the business was big enough to hold the two of them.”

Desperate situations required desperate measures. Nathan briefly floated a larger, grander vision of Nathan's Famous, one that he thought could contain the ambitions of both his sons. He would move the store to the old Feltman's site and put it on a huge raised platform that ran from Surf Avenue to the sea. Underneath the platform would be space for parking.

Ida put the kibosh on the plan. At this point in their lives, she told her husband, they should be thinking about retirement, not embarking on grand building schemes. As usual, her opinion held sway with Nathan. The idea was shelved. But Ida and Nathan continued to have frequent discussions about what to do about the feud disrupting their family and their business.

Something had to give. One of the brothers had to leave. Any oddsmaker worth his salt would have put money on Sol, but it was Murray who jumped first.

The small Nassau County town of Oceanside was located fifteen miles to the east of Coney Island, past what was then called Idlewild Airport but would later become JFK. A former clam-digger's hamlet originally named Christian Hook, Oceanside in the fifties was well on its way to turning into what every other Long Island town around it was fast becoming—a bedroom community for commuters to New York City. It was of those budding suburbs that Murray talked about whenever he argued changing times meant Nathan's Famous had to expand.

The “dusty thoroughfare”—the description was from a
Newsday
report—of Long Beach Road ran north-south through Oceanside, linking the towns of the barrier island of Long Beach to the larger municipality of Rockville Centre. Where Long Beach Road crossed Windsor Parkway stood Roadside Rest, once a local landmark but by the midfifties just a large but fast-fading restaurant.

Founded as a rural fruit and vegetable depot in 1921 by Leon Shor, who would later run a chain of popular Long Island eateries called Shor's, Roadside Rest developed into a thriving hot dog stand, “one of the many imitators of Nathan's Famous,” according to a
Newsday
article.

Success led to expansion. In 1929, the Shor family built an elaborate structure with Spanish architectural flavorings, oddly out of place in its Long Island environs, probably the only outsize Moorish villa this side of California. It occupied a full block, with such amenities as seating for three thousand, a garden terrace, and Kiddieland, a small amusement park on the grounds.

“The small place grew from hot dogs and hamburgers to the heights of a well-known supper club,” according to Morton Shor, the son of the founder. “It featured the legendary big bands led by Tommy Dorsey, Benny Goodman, Eddy Duchin, Lionel Hampton, and others. There were nightly [radio] broadcasts of the bands' concerts and dancing under the stars.”

Roadside Rest became, in other words, a hot dog stand on steroids. Exactly the place of Murray's dreams.

“I wanted Oceanside,” he recalled later. “Perfect deal. Seven acres. Seven! Beautiful business.”

By 1956, when Murray first investigated taking it on, that “beautiful business” had hit the skids. The big bands weren't coming anymore, and the customers weren't, either. The fickle finger of public taste pointed elsewhere. Roadside Rest, its bleached stucco exterior stained and faded, was a white elephant. The sprawling restaurant had actually closed its doors.