Famous Nathan (7 page)

At the same time that anti-immigration organizations were mobilizing on the political front, progressive initiatives sought to further what today we could call human rights. Just a month after Nathan's arrival, in May 1912, the largest suffragist demonstration in history was held in New York City. Left-leaning free speech protests sprang up across the country, challenging the silencing of labor advocates in San Diego and elsewhere. Both the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the Urban League had been founded just a few years earlier.

The
Titanic
disaster continued to cast a pall. The front page of the
New York Times
featured news of the sinking for eighteen straight days. Funerals, memorials, and relief benefits for the doomed ship studded the New York City social calendar. On Sunday, April 21, stage stars George M. Cohan and Eddie Foy gathered together Broadway singers and dancers for a gala benefit, while the following Monday the celebrated Neapolitan tenor Enrico Caruso sang Arthur Sullivan's “The Lost Chord” at the Metropolitan Opera House. Official inquiries in the United States and in Britain kept alive the contentious issue of who was to blame for the catastrophe.

A popular sentiment of the time was “God went down with
Titanic,
” meaning that the randomness of the calamity challenged faith. Commentators extracted various lessons from the wreck, including those that were critical of capitalism, lax maritime regulations, and the hubris of the ship's owners. From pulpits came sermons that linked the sinking to the evils of modern decadence. “The remote cause of this unspeakable disaster,” preached the archbishop of Baltimore, “is the excessive pursuit of luxury.”

The catastrophe overshadowed the presidential election primary season that year, essentially a three-way race between incumbent Republican Robert Taft, Progressive Theodore Roosevelt, and former Princeton University president (and eventual winner) Woodrow Wilson. From the left came the Socialist candidacy of Eugene V. Debs, orchestrator of the Pullman Strike.

Nathan shared the New York Jewish community with some of the leading historical figures of the day. The pioneer Zionist David Ben-Gurion was there, as was, briefly, Leon Trotsky. Another arrival was the great Yiddish writer Sholem Aleichem, author of the Tevye stories that would later be dramatized on Broadway as
Fiddler on the Roof
.

Passing through the same Lower East Side streets as figures famous and otherwise, living amid noteworthy historical shifts, Nathan pursued his anonymous workaday ways. He lived with relatives, for a period in “a shoemaker's cellar,” other times in tenements, always paying no more than a dollar a month in rent. He later remembered the meager weekend fare in his lodgings. “Eggs were $1.40 a dozen [$32 in today's money], so they only gave me one—they only ate one egg for Sunday breakfast.”

It didn't matter much what his impoverished home life was like, since he was always working. Nathan negotiated the world of Manhattan luncheonettes with something that approached surefooted confidence. He seemed to know instinctively when to leave a job and when to stay, when to follow a boss or when to cut himself loose.

Within a month, the restaurant where he originally worked was sold. The new owner, Sam, asked Nathan to stay on. “Sam called me ‘Benny,'” Nathan recalled, because of the problem with multiple Nathans working in the same place. “He said to me, ‘Benny, I want you to be the manager.' So he made me the manager of the coffee counter, cakes, and pies, in charge of everything. He gave me the keys to the store. I came in at six o'clock to open up the place.”

But Nathan's old boss beckoned. Max Leventhal was opening a new luncheonette on Eighteenth Street between Fifth and Sixth, near architect Daniel H. Burnham's Flatiron Building, one of Manhattan's first skyscrapers and surely its most distinctive. The neighborhood was busy, near to the shopping district called Ladies' Mile.

Max came to Nathan with a job offer. “I want you to come work for me. In two weeks, I'm opening a new place.”

Nathan jumped. He didn't even ask the salary. “Why? Because I knew if I worked for him, I'll learn the business, because he really knows the business, in and out. And Sam, the new boss, he was a tailor who wanted to try something new. I didn't know how long he was going to last or if he's going to last at all in the business, so I didn't want the surprise.”

Max Leventhal's new place would be a franchise in the Busy Bee chain, founded by Maxwell Garfunkel, the Moldavian immigrant owner of more than a dozen luncheonettes located throughout lower Manhattan. Innovative for their period, every Max's Busy Bee worked on the principle of slim profit margins and high volume, making money a penny at a time. The patrons were office boys, building workers, struggling young lawyers, businessmen, and the host of others who did not have much money to spend on their lunches.

Maxwell Garfunkel had come to the United States at age thirteen from Chișinău, near Odessa, in 1888. Arriving in New York with all of fifty cents, Garfunkel toiled and saved. Eight years later, he had amassed a $7,000 bankroll—the equivalent of $164,000 today. He used the money to open his first restaurant, on Ann Street in downtown Manhattan. Everything in the joint—coffee, pies, lemonade, typical luncheonette fare at the time—could be had for two cents. Max's Busy Bee would not vary its prices for twenty years.

When Garfunkel retired in 1928, he offered a glimpse of the life of a hardworking luncheonette man. “For forty years, I've worked from five o'clock in the morning until eight o'clock at night. I've never had a real vacation. I am going to retire. I am tired. Money is not everything. Frankfurters, coffee, lemonade, savings accounts, seven days a week, little sleep, bustle, shouts, profits, frankfurters, soft-shell crabs—these are my memories.”

In his new job at the Eighteenth Street Busy Bee, and after only six months in America, Nathan would make $7.50 a week. When a competing luncheonette on Twenty-First Street offered essentially to double his salary, he turned it down. “I says, ‘Sorry, I'm working, and I'm not going to give up my job.' Why? Because I didn't know how long the Twenty-First Street place was going to last in the business.”

During this period, Nathan posed for three photographs of himself at the luncheonette. A bright-eyed but serious twenty-two-year-old man stares fixedly at the camera. In two of the shots, he stands apart from his fellow workers. An accident of the situation? Or is he already separating himself out from the crowd?

On the job, Nathan held various positions, including an early twentieth-century version of an advertising Mad Man. He used to post himself on the sidewalk outside the Busy Bee and loudly hawk its fare.

“So I was standing and working at the lemonade, a penny for a glass of lemonade. I took in fifteen dollars a day.” (Which, to stop and think about it, means he sold 1,500 servings! In a ten-hour day, that works out to be more than two sales a minute.) “And I was hollering, ‘Lemonade! Lemonade!' And the cops used to come over, trying to stop me.”

The former authority-cowed Galician immigrant had learned by then to stand up for himself. He told the police, “Don't tell me, Officer, to stop. Go to the boss and tell him to stop me. If he stops me, I'll be glad to help, to stop hollering.”

For two years, the hardworking, full-throated young Nathan followed Max Leventhal around Manhattan, moving from the Eighteenth Street store to another at 99 Spring Street, between Mercer and Broadway. The luncheonette business was a movable feast. But a change was afoot. Awaiting Nathan was an introduction to a fabled realm that would utterly transform his life.

 

5

Nickel Empire

“I'll give you a dollar and a half a day, but you have to pay if you eat a frankfurter.” Feltman's Ocean Pavilion, the original hot dog haven at Coney Island.

THERE MIGHT HAVE
been sufficient hours crammed into Nathan's five-in-the-morning-to-eight-at-night workdays, but there weren't enough days in the week. Because of Abrahamic traditions, the restaurant business in Manhattan was a somewhat limited affair. On Saturdays, businesses were either closed or slow because of the Jewish Sabbath, and Sundays were dead because of the Christians. What was a determined young luncheonette counterman to do? Two days of thumb twiddling wasn't an option. He needed to
work
.

Gradually, the whole Handwerker clan emigrated from Europe. Nathan's older sister Anna was one of the early arrivals. Everyone was too busy to see much of each other, but Anna told him tales of a beach town in Brooklyn where she sometimes found part-time employment. It sounded like some fantasy destination, an amusement park similar to, but far outdoing, the famed Prater in Vienna.

He had first visited one memorable Saturday during his first summer in America. Nathan took a younger cousin of his, a girl whose name has been lost to history, for a day at the beach. The journey through the city from Manhattan to the sea was arduous. The train lines stretching from Manhattan all the way to Coney Island were still a couple of years in the future. Nathan and his cousin hopped aboard a subway from Manhattan to downtown Brooklyn. From there, they took a ten-cent streetcar ride along Flatbush Avenue, spending another nickel for a transfer at Prospect Park Circle to a train that ran south on Ocean Parkway.

The famous boulevard, a creation of Central Park designers Frederick Olmsted and Calvert Vaux, cut through the heart of Brooklyn. It was the kind of broad, stately thoroughfare that allowed New York to rival the great capitals of Europe for elegance. As its name implies, Ocean Parkway led Nathan and his cousin straight to the Atlantic.

A small spit of scrubland, sand dunes, and beach, Coney Island served as a barrier island for the mainland, protecting it from the crash of storms. The Lenape tribe named the place Narrioch, meaning “land without shadows,” since it faced south and was bathed in sunlight for the entire day. The first settlers from Europe, the Dutch, called it Conyne Eylandt, or Rabbit Island, for the copious number of the long-eared critters that infested the grassy sand dunes. By the time a pair of Galician immigrant cousins showed up in the seaside resort town, it had taken on its modern name.

Nathan was feeling flush. He had five dollars in his pocket, a full week's wages, the equivalent of $120 today. All the amusement rides were a nickel. At Feltman's, the sprawling restaurant and pleasure garden that its founder had developed from lowly pushcart beginnings, frankfurters in a warm bun were sold for a dime.

Nathan sponsored the whole trip. “I was glad to do it. I enjoyed it.” He recalled that his cousin “bought a whole stack of Cracker Jacks.” The snack—actually Cracker Jack, singular—has been called “the first junk food.” Even back then, it was already associated with America's national pastime of baseball, from a well-known mention in the 1908 song “Take Me Out to the Ball Game.” Nathan later remembered getting angry and yelling at his young cousin when she flippantly gave boxes of the snack away to passersby, a willful squandering of his hard-earned money.

All told, though, it had been a fine summer outing, one of the first days Nathan had taken off in his new homeland. Back in Manhattan, he began to encounter constant mentions and references to the Brooklyn beach resort that he and his cousin had visited. Max Singer, a Coney Island businessman who owned a small stand on Surf Avenue, made it a habit of dropping by Max's Busy Bee every Thursday. Mr. Singer was romantically interested in Nathan's sister Anna and soon struck up a friendship with her brother Nathan. Eventually, Nathan asked the man about employment, trying to fill his slack time when the Manhattan luncheonette traffic dwindled on the weekends.

“Mr. Singer, could you give me a job in the summertime, Saturday, Sunday? We close the place [Max's Busy Bee] in the afternoon on Saturday. So I can come out and work for you on Saturday. I could work half a day on Saturday, until one, two o'clock in the morning, and then Sunday a whole day.”

His current seventy-five-hour workweek wasn't enough. Nathan wanted more. But Max Singer couldn't do anything for him. He suggested that the eager beaver should go out to Coney Island himself and canvass the many restaurants that were springing up along Surf Avenue, catering to the growing crowds of visitors.

It took him a while, but in the summer of 1914, Nathan finally went out to Coney Island to seek seasonal work in earnest. At first, he struck out. A certain Mr. Kissler, a contact given to him by Singer, was friendly but unable to help. “I'm sorry, I'm filled up,” he was told. “But go to this fella, across the street.” When that establishment also lacked openings, Nathan would return to Singer. “Can you give me another place to go?” he would ask. He was dogged, unwilling to take no for an answer, unafraid of bothering people again and again.

Finally, Singer said the magic words. “Go to Feltman's.”