Famous Nathan (8 page)

The restaurant complex first founded by Charles Feltman in the boom years after the Civil War was hard to miss. By the time Nathan visited, it sprawled over a full city block, West Tenth Street from Surf Avenue to the beach. The place hosted a million visitors during the summer season.

Charles Feltman died in 1910, but his business continued to thrive under his family. When Nathan went to the restaurant looking for work, he approached Sam Land, a frankfurter chef at one of the grills. The man was a subcontractor of sorts, working for a percentage of the sales, and he hired out workers on his own.

“Mr. Singer sent me,” Nathan told him, not quite an outright lie. “I want to ask if you can give me a job.”

“Where are you working now?” asked Land.

“I'm at the Busy Bee in Manhattan.”

“What are you doing at the Busy Bee?”

“Everything,” Nathan replied. “Selling frankfurters, cutting rolls…”

“Are you a good roll cutter?”

“Excellent.” That wasn't a lie. He had enough experience to know he was a good roll cutter. After all, how bad can one be at such work? The real skill was speed. On a busy summer's day, Feltman's dished up forty thousand hot dogs to one hundred thousand customers.

“I'll give you a dollar and a half a day,” Land told Nathan. “But you have to pay if you eat a frankfurter.”

“So I worked,” Nathan remembered in his characteristically understated way. His summer workweek stretched to seven days. He returned home from Coney on Sunday at one or two o'clock. In those days before a subway connection, the commute into the city took him at least ninety minutes by trolley car. Monday morning, he had to show up at his regular job at the Busy Bee by 6:00
A.M.

Hard work. Coney Island. Frankfurters. He might not have immediately realized what he had done, but Nathan had put together a winning formula that would propel him to success. There was just one more factor to the algorithm, and it would take him a little while to discover it.

The nickel.

*   *   *

The Coney Island that Nathan first encountered was in the midst of a startling change, transforming from an elitist playground into a truly populist one. In the early years of the twentieth century, what attracted wide interest to the area was not the sea, not amusements, not food. The words “Coney Island” meant one thing: horse racing.

Three tracks—sponsored by the Brighton Beach Racing Association, the Coney Island Jockey Club, and the Brooklyn Jockey Club—catered to a mania for horse flesh and gambling. Racing made Coney famous, with the season stretching from May to October.

Even as it attracted up to forty thousand spectators for a race, the turf was by and large a rich man's game. Diamond Jim Brady, millionaire scion William Kissam Vanderbilt, corrupt attorney Abraham Hummel all ran thoroughbreds. Wealthy Wall Streeters, industrialists, and business magnates lined the shores of Sheepshead Bay with their pleasure boats and summer beach houses. The three tracks each had a different atmosphere. Brighton Beach was known for racing touts and gamblers, Gravesend drew the hoi polloi, while Sheepshead Bay (“America's Ascot”) invited the social elite.

Growing hand in hand with the tracks were attractions catering to the adult male: brothels, beer halls, and gambling dens. Located in the so-called Gut District of Coney's West End, these disreputable businesses were mostly wood-framed structures that regularly burned to the ground, only to rise again, phoenixlike, from the ashes. The Gut gave Coney Island its seamy, dangerous reputation.

The horse-racing craze helped Coney Island to grow, with several rail lines servicing the area and Ocean Parkway providing a direct link to downtown Brooklyn. But in the years before Nathan arrived to take up his lowly duties as a Feltman's roll cutter, a wave of moralistic and Progressive fervor swept over the country that proved fatal to the Coney Island tracks—and to the Gut.

Ministers railed against the excesses of gambling. The kind of elite monopolists and robber barons that supported the sport fell prey to Teddy Roosevelt's reforms. In 1908, Albany established regulations against betting at the tracks. Two years later, when the rules were tightened, the law sounded the death knell for Coney Island racing.

The tracks died, but Coney continued its upswing. A surging turn-of-the-century economy put a modicum of disposable income into the pockets of New York's laboring classes. The increasing recognition of the workers' half holiday on Saturday meant more free time for many. The idea of the weekend—opposed to the Sabbath—was slowly being born. In place of the elite horsemen, Coney began to attract the hordes of working day laborers who now found themselves with free time and a small amount of cash to spend on leisure activities.

By the end of the 1800s, the rail lines and roads that had led to the tracks now allowed the further development of a new sort of pleasure ground, one that welcomed and embraced even those with the most limited of means. This would be the cresting tide that would lift Nathan Handwerker to prosperity.

Charles Feltman could serve as his model. The founder of Nathan's new place of employment never got the opportunity to meet the ambitious young roll cutter posted at one of his famous restaurant's grills. But he would have seen glimmers of his own work ethic and drive in the young man's face.

Born in the German district of Hanover in 1841, Feltman came to America at age fourteen. He worked many different jobs, in a coal yard and on a farm, before fate led him to a bakery on Smith Street in South Brooklyn. While he was delivering baked goods, he first encountered the charms of the seaside at Coney Island.

A company brochure from Feltman's credits its founder with having invented the hot dog: “Charles Feltman is widely known to have invented the hot dog at Coney Island in 1867,” the pamphlet reads. But the truth is that the hot dog has many fathers. Charles Feltman is undeniably one of them. He never used the term himself, however, preferring other names: frankfurter (after the city of Frankfurt in his native Germany), “dachshund sandwich,” or “Coney Island red hot.” His creation was specifically a pork sausage lovingly nested in a warm bun.

Others claim precedence—or at least incidence. At the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition in Saint Louis, a Bavarian immigrant named Anton Ludwig Feuchtwanger supposedly handed out gloves for his customers to handle the hot sausages he sold them. When that practice proved too awkward and expensive, Feuchtwanger's wife proposed placing the frankfurter in a bun. He remains prominent in the lore because the name “Feuchtwanger,” when connected to sausage, is too hard to resist.

The popularization of the hot dog has also been credited to Harry Stevens, a Brit who innovated concessions at American baseball games in the early twentieth century. On a cold day, when his ice cream sandwiches weren't moving, Stevens instructed his staff to sell “dachshund sandwiches” instead. Ted Dorgan, a cartoonist commemorating the event, did not know how to spell “dachshund,” so he called them “hot dogs” instead.

The mythology around the invention of the hot dog may be charming, but the actual facts are elusive. Smallish pork sausages known as
Würstchen
that were similar to the modern hot dog seem to have originated in the area near modern-day Frankfurt in the Middle Ages. “Weiner” is another spelling of Vienna, where a pork-beef variation became popular in the 1700s. “Dog,” as applied to sausage, arose from the fact that dogmeat was sometimes used in German sausage making. The first verified use of the term “hot dog,” as applied to sausage, cropped up in an 1892 New Jersey newspaper article.

None of this detracts or diminishes from the incredible up-by-the-bootstraps story of Charles Feltman. The years immediately following the Civil War found him hauling a lowly pie wagon around the dunes and “sandy wastes” of Coney Island. The crowds had not yet descended upon the windswept beach, but even then, there were hints of the future. Feltman sold his fare to the horse-racing aficionados and to the swelling numbers of people who came to Coney for the bracing seaside air.

For the first few years, Feltman worked his pushcart. Clams were the big sellers in the neighborhood. The humble bivalves were harvested in seemingly inexhaustible numbers along the shores of Sheepshead Bay, on the leeward side of the island, and to a lesser degree along the ocean shore. It was the clam, a cheap and abundant staple, not frankfurters, that was most closely associated with Coney during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Grilled clams, clam roasts, and the clambake were common features of a visit to the beach.

Throughout the 1860s, the young Feltman brought pies from Brooklyn bakeries and delivered them to Coney Island businesses. He made the rounds of what was then a ramshackle collection of seaside saloons and hotels. Responding to popular demand, he began to sell seafood to the tourists from his pie wagon. But when the weather turned brisk, customers wanted not cold clams but hot food. How to serve up a hot sandwich from a pushcart?

The mythology surrounding the rise of Charles Feltman records the specific circumstances of what happened next. The pie wagon entrepreneur presented his problem to a wheelwright named Donovan (first name or last is unknown) who had built Feltman's original pushcart. Donovan worked out of a shop at East New York Avenue and Howard Street, on the far eastern edge of Crown Heights in Brooklyn. There he first fabricated an innovation that has lasted to this day, installing in the well of Feltman's cart a charcoal brazier for the sausages and a metal warming box for the rolls.

Thus, in the year 1867—other sources say 1874—came the birth of the hot dog, the frankfurter in a bun, on American shores.

The dream was always to step up from the pushcart to a permanent location. In 1871, Charles Feltman did exactly that, leasing a small tract of land for his first restaurant. Three years later, Feltman purchased land outright, a tract at West Tenth Street that stretched to the sea. In those days, the shoreline was ever changing, and in subsequent years, Coney Island's foremost restaurateur saw his property actually increase in size as sand piled up on the beach.

He took advantage. His Ocean Pavilion sprawled. It would grow to become an incredible assemblage of restaurants, attractions, and gardens, capable of plating eight thousand dinners at a time. Feltman fully recognized that a good businessman had to have a little showman in him. He built a ballroom, a roller coaster, and an outdoor movie theater. Feltman's 1877 carousel was designed by master carver Charles Looff. The
New York Times
reported that he imported “the first Tyrolean yodelers ever heard in this country.”

Feltman's employed a thousand workers. In addition to the nine restaurants and seven grills on the premises, there was also a hotel, a bathhouse, a model Swiss village, and a
Deutscher Garten
—a German beer garden—modeled after those in his beloved hometown of Hanover. Feltman's maple garden was famous as a gathering place for high rollers from the seaside horse tracks. The whole Ocean Pavilion complex fully deserved the appellation “pleasure garden.”

In 1886, Feltman started his own bakery on Classon Avenue in Brooklyn's Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood. As that prospered, he erected a massive building at Sixth Avenue and Tenth Street near Prospect Park to house his thriving business. Ocean Parkway, the main stem leading directly to Coney, was just a few blocks away. Feltman could bake his own rolls for the dachshund sandwiches he sold in the thousands. The record was forty thousand Coney Island red hots sold in a single day. Be that as it may, the most celebrated dish at Feltman's Ocean Pavilion was not the frankfurter but the “shore dinner” of clams, oysters, lobster, and fish.

When Nathan became a Feltman's roll cutter, he found it difficult to economically justify his weekend job. To take the trolley for two days, coming and going, cost him sixty cents and an hour and a half of his time. He made six dollars for the two days of work, so the commute cut into his wages. So did lunch. It was a bothersome fact of life that Nathan had to eat. With the advent of World War I, the price of Feltman's frankfurters had just been raised from a nickel to a dime.

“One frankfurter wasn't enough, and if I buy two frankfurters, it would cost me twenty cents for lunch,” Nathan recalled. “I had to buy a glass of beer for five cents, so all in all, that's a quarter.”

In Europe that June, what was then called the Great War finally kicked off in earnest. Self-involved, isolationist America had little idea hostilities were about to break out. Thousands of clueless American tourists were caught unawares, their tour of the Continent rudely interrupted by cannon fire. The little shoemaker's son from Galicia had proved prescient.

Nathan may have been too distracted to give his former homeland much thought. Between the Busy Bee in Manhattan and Feltman's in Coney Island, his seven-days-a-week schedule was brutal. To cut expenses, he would sometimes sleep on the floor in one of Feltman's kitchens. When the Sea Beach line connecting Manhattan and Brooklyn opened on June 22, 1915, the commute to Coney got quicker and cheaper, ten cents each way. Nathan was promoted to a waiter's position, and his wage gradually increased to the point he was making twelve dollars for the weekend, double compared to when he'd started.

“So I was in good shape,” he said. “I was able to save a few dollars.” Specifically, he put away $2.50 a week, a princely $130 per year—in buying power, the modern equivalent of about $3,000.

There were cruel bumps along the road. A bank failed, and Nathan lost the money he had deposited. It was a crushing blow for the newly arrived immigrant, a hard-earned $150 gone without recourse. During those perilous economic times, banks failed with regularity. In 1913, forty-six collapsed in the United States, with total assets of $13.8 million. In December of that same year, President Wilson signed the Owens-Glass Act, a measure that created the Federal Reserve System and was designed to quell the financial panics that led to bank failures. But the legislation was too late to help Nathan Handwerker.