Famous Nathan (20 page)

“No, I don't like this,” Ida told the spice makers in Steve's account. “It needs more this and this.”

“It was all trial and error,” Steve said. “She told me this. She experimented with a different spice and meat, the texture, the consistency, the casing, everything. All her. And him. They worked as a team.”

Steve's father, Murray, also came down on the side of Ida. “My mother developed the spice formula,” he said. “She worked with the manufacturer of the frankfurter. He had spices in, but Mom and Pop didn't like the mix. My mother is the one who put the ingredients together and turned it over to the manufacturer. He had to sign an agreement that he would not use it in any other product. Only for Nathan's.”

Can we take these solemn testimonies with a grain of salt—and perhaps with a dash of garlic? Steve Handwerker was always an unabashed partisan of both Nathan and Ida, with whom he spent a lot of time in his youth. Murray demonstrated a real passion for any public relations effort that enhanced the mythology of Nathan's Famous. For him, the story of Ida's secret spice recipe might have been too good not to be true.

“Is it true?” Ida's other son Sol asked, and then he answered the question himself. “I don't think so. There was no such thing as a secret recipe, I'm sorry to say. They tried different ingredients with the manufacturers, different spices until they got something that they were satisfied with. When Nathan and Ida said that this is what they liked, that was it.”

Here's Paul Berlly, a representative of Hygrade, Nathan's longtime frankfurter supplier: “I knew Ida very well. She never said anything about the secret spices, but they gave a recipe to us, what they wanted in a frankfurter. Of course, I hate to say this, but Nathan never made a frankfurter. Hygrade made the frankfurter. And we used the spices to our discretion. We made it just a little different, a tiny bit different from the ordinary spices we would use in our process.”

Steve has a succinct reply to Berlly. “Bullshit,” he said. “It was all Grandma. She gave [Hygrade] the formula that they ultimately used. They tried to imitate it. And there were issues about that, because [Nathan and Ida] didn't want to see Hygrade stealing the formula. Hygrade had the formula because she gave it to them. The company stole it from Grandma.”

Other arguments against Ida's secret recipe exist. Many Handwerker grandchildren have said they never heard the story from their grandparents. Nor did veteran employees remember Nathan telling them about Ida's role in formulating the spices. It appears to be just one more durable bit of public relations mythology.

Just what was the Nathan's Famous formula for its delicious frankfurters? Secret or not, passed down from Ida's grandmother or not, the recipe comprised eighteen different ingredients. Included were specifications on the type of beef to be used. Bull meat was leaner and was preferred to the fattier meat of the cow. Also specified was the location of the meat on the animal (beef cheeks, brisket trim, etc.) and the type of casing employed. The ingredients were listed in proportional amounts or amounts per pound. The spices included garlic, paprika, and salt. Written out, the proprietary formula took up a page and a half of closely written text.

PR men might have attempted to make Ida over into the Colonel Sanders of Nathan's Famous, but she was happiest laboring behind the scenes. In the store's early years, she would post herself in the back kitchen, surrounded by a gaggle of sisters and friends. The whole group sat on wooden crates around the big bags of potatoes and onions, spending hours peeling and gossiping. The matriarchal atmosphere resembled a coffee klatch or a quilting bee. At these work sessions, Ida was always the headmistress, especially with her blazingly fast hands.

Said former Nathan's Famous manager Hy Brown: “If they would peel ten fifty-pound bags of onions in an hour, everybody would tell you that Ida could peel them in half an hour.”

That particular matriarchal idyll came to an end with the installation of a water jet–powered peeling machine. But Ida continued to put in long hours at the store and still maintained her guarded, private persona.

“Ida worked her fingers to the bone in that place,” testified Jack Dreitzer. Bill Handwerker, Ida's grandson, put it this way: “Everybody talks about Nathan Handwerker. I always say that it was both. My grandmother was right beside him during those twenty-hour days. That's important: it was not just him, it was both.”

The woman behind the scenes occasionally stepped out front. A rare, memorable instance of Ida's hard-hitting public demeanor came when labor strife first hit Nathan's Famous in the summer of 1934. Union representatives attempted to organize the employees. They set up pickets in front of the store to agitate for shorter hours. The Handwerker family split along political lines. Among those protesting along Surf Avenue one day was Nathan's older brother, Israel, an occasional store employee.

Incensed by a family member's betrayal, Ida chased her brother-in-law off the picket line with a butcher knife.

The strike against Nathan's Famous was at least in part a product of the times, when large sectors of the American populace were radicalized by the economic injustices of the Depression. Both Ida and Nathan considered themselves Democrats, falling in with the prevailing Tammany Hall power structure. But they reacted to the union organizers with obstinate resistance.

The strike, the first of two major ones to hit Nathan's Famous, continued for weeks. Union agitators threw stink bombs into the store. They harassed those workers who crossed the picket line and tried to head off customers at the counters. Police escorted Handwerker family members to and from their homes. Coming during the hectic summer season, the strike threatened to thoroughly disrupt the business.

The mayor of New York City at that time, Fiorello La Guardia, stepped in to bring the warring sides together. He summoned the parties to his office at city hall in downtown Manhattan. Nathan faced off with the head of the Food Workers Industrial Union, the outfit that was attempting to organize the store's workers. The mayor, then only six months in office, acted as mediator.

At one point in the negotiations, Nathan turned to the union leader.

“Look, I don't have to go through this,” he said. “I'll tell you what I'm going to do. If you don't stop this strike, I'm going to tear down the restaurant. I'll build a carousel on my corner. And I'll put horses on the carousel that don't eat and don't shit and don't strike.”

La Guardia, at least, broke up laughing at the salty language. Eventually, Nathan prevailed. The Supreme Court of the State of New York issued an injunction against the strikers, and the action fizzled out.

“By the summer of 1935 the strike wasn't on no more,” recalled Jack Dreitzer. “How did it end? Nathan got his way. He did what he wanted with the union. He was a powerful man. He had a lot of power.”

 

13

The Season

“At the end of the summer, we used to sit for days and days and count and roll change. That was our profit.” Nathan's Famous, ready to serve.

EVERY BUSINESS ON
Coney, including Nathan's Famous, lived and died by the summer season. The period actually extended far beyond the actual months of summer, embracing the thirty-five weeks from Lincoln's birthday in February to the early weeks of September. But the heart of the season stretched between what was then called Decoration Day—rechristened Memorial Day only in the 1950s—to Labor Day. Normally, there were fourteen weekends during this stretch. During lucky years, there could be fifteen.

No Nathan's Famous employee ever saw a leisure weekend in summer. Saturday and Sunday were the crunch days, when Coney flooded with visitors and the crowds stacked up outside the store. Then the job was seven days a week, twelve hours a day. In summer, the store was open twenty-four hours. The single day of the year when Nathan's Famous shut its doors: Yom Kippur.

The seaside resort town always played weather roulette. Nathan and every other businessman on Coney Island prayed for every single one of those fourteen or fifteen summer weekends to be hot and dry. Rainouts meant the crowds stayed away. A storm could blow away profits. Five or six rainy weekends out of the sacred fourteen meant ruin.

A carnival after Labor Day marked the season's end, as children started the school year and tourists remained at home. So the weeklong “Mardi Gras” celebration was largely a Coney-centric event. Employees and bosses alike celebrated a successful season or mourned a rained-out one. The whole resort town got swept up in a swirling street party. There were parades every night, with Nathan's Famous sponsoring several floats every year. The event culminated with a Saturday baby parade.

Then Coney shut itself down. The store was the sole business on the main drag that stayed open year round.

Throughout the twentieth century, Coney Island's popularity and vitality ebbed and flowed with the tide. For both Nathan's Famous and the wider resort town around it, the mid-1930s represented one kind of high-water mark. Before the explosive growth of the suburbs transformed the New York City urban matrix, before the 1939 World's Fair in Queens siphoned off visitors, before the war exploded and changed everything, Coney Island was on the upswing—popular, raucous, iconic, a symbol of American democracy.

Democracy, yes, but within limits. Areas of the beach were still segregated. The demographic pie was sliced pretty thin, too, with northern Italians accorded one zone, southern Italians another, and Sicilians gathering elsewhere. African Americans had their place beside the Steel Pier. The system was informal and not officially policed but carefully maintained nonetheless. In other cases, discrimination was official. Steeplechase Park invited African Americans in but denied them the use of its pool.

Coney Island's bathhouses were also strictly segregated, remembered former Nathan's Famous worker Hyman Silverglad. “If any black person wanted to go into any one of these very nice places, that had steam rooms, all kinds of athletic facilities, a huge Olympic pool, they said, ‘No, this is a private club, we don't allow people to come in.' Two minutes later, a white person would come in and they would sell them a ticket.”

New York City's population at that time hovered around seven million. A healthy percentage of that number, ranging as high as 18 percent, visited Coney Island during the hot weekend afternoons of summer. Some five hundred thousand of these sojourners, representing seventy million pounds of human flesh, crammed themselves onto the generous strip of seaside beach, fifty-seven acres of sand at high tide. Others resorted to the mammoth Municipal Baths or the area's celebrated commercial bathhouses.

“Every bathhouse, which today would be like a modern spa, had its ethnic flavor,” said Silverglad. “Now take Ravenhall: basically Italian. Take Washington Baths: basically Jewish. Washington Annex: a lot of Asians there. Ocean Tide, Irish. Hahn's, Irish. Scoville's, Irish, upper-class Irish, if I may say so. McLochlin, Irish.”

Seafarers could hear the dull roar of Coney Island's crowds, spielers, barkers, and touts a mile out into the Atlantic. Smells, too, wafted over the water. With offshore breezes, the residents of Sandy Hook, New Jersey, six miles south across Lower New York Bay, reported the occasional odor of fried food and the sugary smell of cotton candy.

Eating was as much a pastime as ocean bathing. Small booths under the boardwalk offered easy access for swimmers and sunbathers to knishes, candied apples, corn on the cob. The scent of cooking onions came off the hamburger grill of the store.

During this period, the Coney Island of the imagination arose from a relatively limited rectangle of land, two and a quarter miles long and a thousand feet wide. Braced on all sides by residential districts, including Sea Gate to the west and Brighton Beach to the east, the amusement zone—the part of the island that comes to mind when the words “Coney Island” are pronounced—extended from the south side of Surf Avenue to the beach. Steeplechase Park marked one end of the zone, while Luna Park and Feltman's Ocean Pavilion marked the other.

Between the two ran the seven blocks of the Bowery, a narrow lane crowded with rides, games, penny arcades, sideshows, and food booths. The Bowery was also the realm of freaks: Spider Boy, Singing Lottie, and the Man with the Revolving Head, as well as the popular microcephalic “pinheads,” Zippo and Pippo.

The sound of the ballyhoo—a sample spectacle that drew customers into the shows and attractions—punctuated the afternoons and evenings. Spielers called out their pitches, from a simple chant of “
Step
inside!
Step
inside!” to offers of “Three balls for a dime!”

Steeplechase Park, located to the southwest of Nathan's Famous, represented a fifteen-acre entity unto itself. The western entrance to the park, off the Bowery behind the store, featured the leering face that was the emblem of Coney Island and the promising words, “Steeplechase Funny Place.” For an admission charge of fifty cents, fun-lovers gained access to all the park's attractions, including a Ferris wheel, a roller coaster, and a five-acre pavilion. The latter was one of the wonders of Coney, with hardwood flooring and a soaring glass ceiling that shielded revelers from the elements.