Famous Nathan (34 page)

The failing Nathan's Famous outlets began to gain a seedy reputation. One of them, at Eighth Street and Sixth Avenue in Greenwich Village, was the target of a very public fight in the late seventies, when a local community board campaigned to have it closed down. New York City had hit a rough patch. Bankruptcy was a real possibility. These were the days of the famous headline
FORD TO CITY: DROP DEAD
! The city's financial problems filtered down to the streets in plagues of crime, homelessness, and drug use.

All this hit city businesses hard. Activists portrayed the Greenwich Village Nathan's Famous as a “shooting gallery” full of junkies and the “absolute dregs” of the neighborhood. Nathan, the neatnik and control freak, would have been appalled.

“Once, when I went in, the security guard served me my drink,” said Rita Lee, who sat on Community Board 2. “When I turned my back for a second and looked back, a dog was eating out of my plate.”

“The community was not happy with us, and we were not happy with them,” said Murray. “They said [the store] attracted the wrong people, and I couldn't convince them that it wasn't Nathan's fault.”

The community board succeeded in kicking the place out of the neighborhood. But similar problems cropped up elsewhere. When families didn't come, the atmosphere of the empty stores turned sour. Part of the issue was the chain's prices, which had risen steadily from the post–World War II period onward.

The nickel dog was long gone. Nathan had pronounced his own eulogy over it in August 1970. “If hot dogs were still selling for five cents,” he mused, “the country would be in bad shape.” By the fifties, the price of a frank had gone up to fifteen cents, with drinks for a dime and crinkle-cut fries ten cents for a small cone cup and fifteen cents for a large one. During the sixties, those prices had doubled and then doubled again.

Oddly enough, for a business founded on a nickel hot dog, other fast-food outlets now undercut Nathan's Famous prices. A frank-fries-and-drink dinner for a family could cost five or even six dollars at the time, while at McDonald's or Wendy's, a meal could be had for three or four dollars. The lights on the Nathan's Famous landscape began to wink out, as twenty stores closed one after another, all in the vital New York metropolitan market.

The rise and fall of the chain during these years can be traced to the number of outlets that were operating. In 1974, there were eighteen. After the Wetson's merger in 1975, the number ballooned to fifty-three. Seven years later it had fallen back down to twenty-three.

Nathan's Famous found itself locked in a losing game of catch-up. In response to McDonald's popular Happy Meals, introduced in the summer of 1979, the chain debuted plastic hand puppets of its new mascot, Mr. Frankie, along with a “Happy Card” discount system and a free “Fun Book” for the kiddies. None of the measures found favor with a fickle public.

“We saw the handwriting on the wall, a little too late, I guess,” Murray told the
New York Times
in 1981, in an article headlined
NATHAN'S HUNT FOR AN UPTURN
.

That year, the company posted a $1.6 million loss. The price of Nathan's Famous stock plummeted to a dollar a share. The million-dollar paper fortunes of the Handwerker clan had abruptly evaporated. The family still owned the Coney Island property and the store building itself, which Murray had leased to the company for a term of sixty years.

The specter of the nickel frankfurter continued to dog the company long after a series of steep price hikes. At the seventieth anniversary celebration of the Times Square Nathan's in 1986, Mayor Ed Koch jokingly complained about the demise of the five-cent hot dog.

Murray grabbed the microphone from the mayor. Nathan's would bring back the five-cent hot dog, he said, when the city brought back the five-cent subway ride. But more had changed with Nathan's Famous than higher prices. The decade of the eighties represented a trough from which the business barely emerged intact.

By then Sol's experiment with Snacktime had ended, at least partly a victim of the same changing realities that had hit Coney Island and the rest of the Nathan's Famous outlets so hard. He had opened another outlet and had advisers pressuring him to go national. But the rampant street crime of the period scared away Snacktime's late-night customers. In 1977, tired of the daily grind, Sol decided he had had enough. He sold the stores and devoted himself to progressive politics, the true love of his life.

In 1984, Nathan's Famous, Inc. licensed Smithfield's, the giant pork producer and meat-packer, to make its all-beef frankfurters, to be sold under the store's brand for sale at supermarkets. The green-and-yellow logo eventually would be seen on grocery shelves throughout the country. It was all part of a Murray-led initiative to pry the company off the financial floor. Slowly, he began to right the listing ship. Sales increased, and the stock price rebounded somewhat. In 1987, Nathan's Famous, Inc. was sold for $22 million and taken private by Equicor Group, Ltd.

Two years later, the executives who led the buyout resigned. Stuart Benson and William Landberg took control in 1989. They hired Robert J. Sherman, a former Wall Street executive who had been with Prudential-Bache, to run the company. In 1990, Nathan's Famous, Inc. registered a $6.1 million loss, the largest in the company's history.

The board of directors dismissed Benson, Landberg, and Sherman, putting in place new management headed by former Wetson's executive Wayne Norbitz. The reorganized company survived a brush with Chapter 11 to become profitable once again. Management took Nathan's Famous back on the public stock exchange, offering shares on NASDAQ.

Murray had left the business in 1987, the year Equicor took Nathan's Famous private. He and Dorothy retired to Florida. Upon his death in May 2011, the
New York Times
hailed him in an obituary headline:
MURRAY HANDWERKER, WHO MADE NATHAN'S MORE FAMOUS, DIES AT 89.
His support for the Coney Island arts community, his achievements in creating popular gathering places in Oceanside and Yonkers, were also celebrated.

All of Murray's big-store behemoths fell, one after another. Bulldozers demolished the former Roadside Rest in June 1976. A condemnation proceeding that was part of a Forty-Second Street redevelopment project closed the Times Square restaurant in 1990, and eventually the towering Condé Nast building occupied the site. Nathan's Famous Yonkers, the old Adventurer's Inn, was the last to go, torn down in 2011. Another Nathan's will rise in its place, 3,500 square feet as opposed to the old 10,000-square-foot current restaurant, built in 1965.

“The menu will be the same [when it reopens], but the restaurant will be much smaller,” said Nathan's Famous president and chief operating officer Wayne Norbitz. “Right now, that is a gigantic facility. The new one will be the size of a very large McDonald's.”

 

Epilogue

An Old-Timer Shows Me the Way

“Where can you still get a good, old-fashioned frankfurter?” Nathan and his grandson Lloyd Handwerker.

CONEY ISLAND IN
the aftermath of a hot dog contest deflates like a party balloon.

At the 2015 Nathan's Famous International Hot Dog Eating Contest, a relative newcomer, twenty-three-year-old Matt “the Megatoad” Stonie, beats out perennial winner Joey “Jaws” Chestnut by downing sixty-two dogs to Joey's sixty. Just to put those numbers in perspective, a distant third contestant manages only thirty-five and a half.

For the occasion, Nathan's Famous president and COO Wayne Norbitz announces the company will donate one hundred thousand of its signature all-beef hot dogs to the Food Bank for New York City.

Looking around Coney Island that day, I sense a decline in the excitement about the contest. Maybe it's because the amazing Takeru Kobayashi isn't here, a champion who voluntarily absented himself six years ago over a squabble with the organizers. But perhaps there's a chance that the new Stonie-Chestnut rivalry will revitalize the event.

Nostalgia isn't what it used to be. I find it hard to let go of the idea that something real, something vital of the past was lost when my grandfather and people like him left the scene. The generational mythology goes something like this. We'll never see the likes of Nathan Handwerker again. The golden age has passed, replaced with corporate sponsors and televised binge-fests.

In the go-go atmosphere of the present day, my sentimental attachment to the way Nathan's Famous used to be seems irrelevant. People have always wished for “the good old days.” Right now, immigrants all over America work just as hard as my grandfather ever did. The country has experienced incredible surges of innovation since the so-called Greatest Generation retired from the stage.

The Nathan's Famous is nowadays more of a licensing business. Consumers get to know the name from the supermarket, the movie theater, and the convenience store, from ball games and from the eating contest. Nathan's Famous now sells potato chips, mustard, and barbecue sauce, among other products.

There are several different types of Nathan's Famous frankfurters available at most grocery stores, including the “Coney Island Original,” with natural casing, just like the old days. Simply in terms of satisfying the greatest number people with the most hot dogs, the modern, retooled, corporate-owned version of the Nathan's Famous frankfurter is the all-time winner.

Or at least a contender. With $71 million in 2014 sales, Nathan's Famous ranks as the fifth-most popular hot dog in America, behind four other brands: Vienna Beef, Kunzler & Company, Oscar Mayer, and Ball Park Franks.

Most of the franks consumed today—$700 million worth—are purchased at retail stores, not hot dog stands. The vast majority of frankfurters sold in the modern era have a standardized shape and appearance. They are almost always skinless, and thus, snap-less.

Some of the archival footage I used in my documentary film shows Nathan's Famous frankfurters in their glorious, Technicolor prime. The fat, glistening sausages rest in their buns, offering themselves up to that first juicy bite.

These marvels were the direct result of one man's will to excel, to be ever watchful, to devote himself to the proposition that quality can be gained and maintained only by ceaseless, unflagging effort. He insisted. He worked. He was always there. Compromise was the enemy. Laziness and the untoasted bun were sins.

Jiro Dreams of Sushi
is another documentary film with a subject similar to my own—it's about a small restaurant, a rigorous master, and a father-son relationship. The Japanese philosophy of
shokunin kishitsu
(“spirit of the craft”) is central to sushi chef Jiro Ono's success. The question posed by
shokunin kishitsu
is simple: How can we do the same thing day after day, year in and year out, with no loss of focus, no compromise on quality, no lessening of the energy that we bring to the task?

Sushi or frankfurters or filmmaking or writing or just plain old getting up in the morning, it doesn't much matter. How do we bring our best to it? How do we not, as the slang phrase goes, “sleep on life”?

My grandfather had a less fancy version of
shokunin kishitsu
: “Everything is common sense.”

I remember going to the post-Nathan, corporate-run Nathan's Famous in Coney Island during the nineties, the old original store, now updated. With me were a couple of old-time employees, Hy Brown and Felix Vasquez. They noticed a change in the layout right away. Whereas in their day, the grills were up against the front counter and the cash registers were behind the server, now a row of cash registers faced toward the customers, and the grills were in back.

A subtle difference. The move was no doubt dictated by some efficiency expert schooled in time-motion studies, or perhaps board of health rules imposed with the thought that reaching directly over the food to serve the customers could be dangerous or unsanitary. But to me—and to Hy Brown and Felix Vasquez—the change symbolized a switch in philosophy. Money first, indicated the new arrangement. Food later.

Another change: The griddles were no longer heated by natural gas. Gone was the former method of increasing and decreasing the gas-fired flames to respond to demand. Electric griddles are much less easy to adjust. The cooks had only limited control over how cooked the franks were.

We sampled the fare. Hy Brown dug into an order of Nathan's Famous fried potatoes.

“Oh, my gosh. They are really not cooked enough,” he said. “They should be browner and crisper. See, you can see the oil here and the oil on my fingers. That's a little too much oil. Either the oil's not hot enough or they didn't leave it in long enough.”

“Nathan's turning in his grave,” Felix added.

Does it matter? On both sides of us, customers crowded at the counters to place their orders. It wasn't the classic crush of the old-time Nathan's Famous, but the place was doing a steady business nonetheless. The modern Coney Island store racks up $8 million in annual sales. Who cared if the potatoes were sometimes not cut fresh at the store, that they were served soggy?