Famous Nathan (30 page)

Nathan begged off the whole project. “I want nothing to do with it,” he said. “Absolutely nothing.”

Murray and Dorothy proceeded with the project, anyway. They knew that he would have to escape from under Nathan's thumb somehow and that it was time to remove themselves from the toxic atmosphere of the Coney Island store. Murray would preserve his status as vice president of Nathan's Famous, but he would pursue his destiny elsewhere.

“I hocked everything we had,” Murray said. “And at that time, my father did everything to discourage me to be successful. Everything!”

“Don't give him any help,” Nathan advised his business contacts. “He's got to do what he's got to do on his own.”

For three years, Murray valiantly tried to breathe life into a corpse—a corpse with wait service and white tablecloth dining. He served selected items from the Nathan's Famous menu, but expanded the choices with such full-bodied fare as turkey dinners and steaks. He threw a “Premier Champagne Carnival” to mark the opening of the summer season. A dance orchestra played on the terrace every Friday and Saturday night.

Roadside Rest was humongous, with two bars, a cocktail lounge, an ice cream corner, and an outdoor fast-service counter similar to the one at the Coney Island store. Murray gave grand new names to the multiple dining rooms. In the Old English Room (“Long Island's Most Unusual and Picturesque Dining Room”), he brought back marquee bands, hiring such well-known names as jazz great Gerry Mulligan.

On the grounds, the Kiddieland carousel continued to turn. Clowns and magicians came in to entertain the families. Murray even opened the stage to public school theatricals and local business promotions. He brought in manager Hy Brown to try to shore up the sagging operation.

Murray's Roadside Rest (“Now … Better Than Ever” read the motto) might have been someone's idea of destination dining, but it didn't click with Long Island residents. The truth can be read in newspaper ads for the place, which trace a series of increasingly desperate price drops (“A whole meal for only 99 cents!”) to try to lure customers.

Nothing helped.

*   *   *

Meanwhile, back at the ranch … Sol experienced working under his father without the distracting presence of Murray. He instituted his own kind of innovations. One idea was to install closed-circuit TV cameras trained on the counters, so that Sol could monitor what was happening out front from the upstairs office.

It might have marked the corrosive effects of capitalism on the committed progressive, that Sol's reading of Orwell's
1984
hadn't stopped him from becoming a Big Brother himself. “You know, you're searching for new things to do,” he said later. “So I thought of that.”

Nathan just laughed at the idea but allowed it to proceed. Sol got his picture in
TV Guide,
along with a big article on the surveillance camera system, but the workers failed to appreciate it. Why would the boss need a camera when they had always done their jobs with such enthusiasm and passion? Sol took the cameras away.

“After a year or two, it really meant nothing,” he admitted. “It accomplished nothing. Just sitting there watching, you don't see a hell of a lot on the televisions. You've got to be downstairs watching if you want to see something.”

Another innovation of Sol's was more successful. Seeing workers struggle day after day with the small cellophane bags used for the store's crinkle-cut potato fries, he concluded that there had to be a better way. He came up with the “V-cup,” a cone of paper that was much easier to fill. The delivery method had the added benefit of making a serving look bigger than it actually was, because the top end of the cone, piled high with fries, worked to trick the eye. The concept was something of a sleight of hand, odd for a confirmed socialist to come up with. But all was fair in sales and marketing.

Finally, in 1959, Sol's time as the only son at the Coney Island store came to end. Roadside Rest neared collapse. Nathan had a choice. He could allow Murray to go fully down the tubes. Or he could put an “I told you so” expression on his face and come to his son's rescue. Sol volunteered to be transferred to Oceanside.

“Nathan wanted Murray to come back to Coney Island,” recalled Hy Brown. “Murray was not doing well in Oceanside. Too much property, too many things happening, too much going on. He was getting into debt there. But the only way he would come back to Coney Island at that particular time was if he was in control. So Nathan sent Sol and Al Shalik out to Oceanside, but the condition was it had to become a Nathan's.”

Sol had advocated for the change. Even then, he was forming a plan to get out of the Coney Island store. As Murray had Hy Brown as his chief aide, Sol had Al Shalik. The two camps performed a do-si-do, with Murray and Hy coming back to Coney Island and Sol and Al going to Oceanside.

“[Nathan] was very concerned that I would have less of an involvement with the Nathan's operation if I stayed involved with Oceanside,” said Murray. “He came to me and wanted to know if I was willing to merge it into the Nathan's organization.”

For the remainder of his life, Murray would stubbornly refuse to admit that his grand experiment had crashed and burned. The word “bankruptcy” never passed his lips. Others were not so discreet.

“Murray tried to build a large, regular restaurant and failed,” Sol stated bluntly. “He was going bankrupt. [Nathan] saved him from that by buying him out and returning him to Coney Island.”

This was Sol's truth, though it might have differed from Murray's. There can be no doubt of the fact that in 1959, Nathan purchased the former Roadside Rest. He reopened it as the first Nathan's Famous location outside of the original Coney Island store. Sol employed what by now was a tried-and-true public relations strategy. For the grand opening, the new outlet served free frankfurters all day.

Murray's failure had forced Nathan into an expansion he never wanted. The Oceanside disaster affected the business in other ways, too. The Long Beach Road restaurant was unionized, so when Nathan took it over, that also eventually resulted in the unionization of the Coney Island location. That in turn effectively meant the end of Nathan's informal employee benefits, including the year-end bonuses. Without him really doing anything, modernization was being done to Nathan. He didn't really consent to any of it, but suddenly he had union workers and another outlet.

Everything was changing. Robert Moses and his massive development projects transformed Coney Island to the degree that Nathan and other old-timers had difficulty comprehending the scope of the changes. Simply put, Moses was a killjoy. In 1953, he had pushed for rezoning that would “enable Coney Island to fit into the pattern envisioned for it as a largely residential seaside area.” Coming to fruition throughout the fifties and sixties, his initiatives proved disastrous.

The beloved seaside resort town began a long slide into decline. Crime started to rise along with the public housing high-rises. Afraid for their safety, the beach crowds stopped coming. The store's customer base eroded, lured by more far-flung destinations, by trips in cars rather than by subway, as well as by the new habit of remaining at home to watch the marvelous novelty of television.

Increasingly, Nathan removed himself to Florida. His life took on an autumnal quality. “I wanted to die here,” he said of the Coney Island store. “I didn't want to retire. Ever.”

By the end of the fifties, Nathan was, in fact, a decade and a half from his death. Perhaps it's not really age that kills us but the world changing around us without our permission. The vacations in Florida stretched longer. Every return to the store felt more awkward, more foreign.

“He felt very bad about leaving,” said Jay Cohen. “But he knew it was inevitable that he was going to leave.”

Hy Brown concurred. “I think he got the idea that he wasn't wanted around there anymore. The expansion was a fact. It was going to go on, and Coney Island was going to have less attention paid to it because of that. The only one he could depend on in Coney Island was Joe Handwerker.”

“Nathan had always worked so hard,” said Dorothy Handwerker. “He really didn't want to see things change. He wanted it to remain status quo.”

For Murray, having Ida and Nathan taper off their store schedules was not a punishment but a reward. His parents had worked long hours for so many long years. It was fitting that they would now be able to step back and enjoy the fruits of their labors.

Murray came into the store one day and found Ida hard at work in the kitchen peeling onions, as usual. He stopped her, taking the paring knife out of her hands.

“Ma, I want you to have a good life now,” he said. “I'm going to help Dad. I don't want you to work anymore. You can retire. You can go.”

Ida reacted, stunned. She immediately burst into tears. “You're throwing me out of the business?” she asked. “You don't need me anymore?”

“I need you,” Murray responded. “I just don't need you at the store.”

The son tried to reason with his mother. She and Nathan had a membership in a beach club at Brighton Beach. Murray told Ida to go there, relax, play cards with her friends. When pleading didn't stop her tears, he changed tactics.

“I don't want you in the store,” he said. “You're only taking my place. If you're going to work, then I'm not going to work.”

The standoff went on for a few weeks. Whenever Ida came into the store, Murray made a show of getting up and leaving. “Oh, okay, you're here now? Fine, I can go home.”

“Grandma was very upset,” recalled Dorothy Handwerker. “She wanted to work. She didn't know what else to do. That was all she ever did. And we were so young and so stupid—we didn't realize she needed that. When Murray insisted that she not come into the store, he was being young and stupid. He thought he was being good to her. He thought he was helping her.”

 

18

Snacktime

“I reached a point where I decided in my own mind that I wanted to get out and start my own business.” A new opportunity on Thirty-Fourth Street.

WHEN NATHAN PLACED
Sol in charge of the Oceanside place, the business stabilized and no longer threatened to be a drain on the company's balance sheet. Putting Nathan's Famous on the sign helped. Sol oversaw the bustling hot dog counter, eliminated the waiter service, and managed to streamline operations in the dining rooms. But he had his eye on another prize. He liked the independence that working at the Oceanside store gave him. Being out from under his father's thumb and his brother's gaze worked out well for him. He yearned to make the situation permanent.

“We became a Nathan's [at Oceanside], and then at a certain point, we achieved what we wanted there,” Sol said. “Things were going well, but I reached a point where I decided in my own mind that I wanted to get out and start my own business. And that's when I started thinking about and developing the idea of Snacktime in New York and pursuing that.”

In effect, Roadside Rest had been Murray's trial run, a test of his strategy of how to expand Nathan's Famous into more locations. Now it was Sol's turn. He formulated a plan to put into play his own ideas about the future of the restaurant business. His leadership of the Oceanside outlet served as excellent preparation for running a store by himself. In 1963, he took the leap.

Thirty-Fourth Street is one of Manhattan's main cross-street thoroughfares, marking the southern boundary of the Midtown business district. At Eighth Avenue, Thirty-Fourth slices past the James A. Farley Post Office Building, with a zip code of 10001 the city's main post office. In the midsixties, the area was the site of an enormous construction project. Opposite the general post office, taking up two entire city blocks, an entertainment and transportation hub rose from the rubble of the glorious old Pennsylvania Station. A new underground commuter station was being put in place with, built right on top of it, a new Madison Square Garden. If, for a high-volume business, location is everything, then Thirty-Fourth Street and Eighth Avenue was prime territory.

It was where Sol chose to strike. He was thirty-eight years old. Officially taking his leave from the Oceanside Nathan's Famous, he departed from the family business entirely. Instead, he would head up his own enterprise. He wanted to conduct a test case of his own, trying to determine if his small-store expansion idea was a viable business strategy. Just to the east of the busy corner of Thirty-Fourth and Eighth, he would erect what was in effect a carbon copy of the Coney Island Nathan's Famous, emphasizing the same holy trinity that his father lived by: speed of service, quality of food, economy of price.

Sol called his new store Snacktime.

Having learned from his experience with Murray's Roadside Rest not to attempt to block the inevitable, Nathan gave at least a partial blessing to the move. He supplied Sol with a start-up loan of $250,000. He permitted him to advertise the fact that he was Nathan Handwerker's son and that he would be selling Nathan's Famous hot dogs in the new place. And he also got Murray to agree not to open any other Nathan's Famous outlet within eight blocks of the Snacktime location.