Free Famous Nathan by Mr. Lloyd Handwerker Page A

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.
    â€œOne 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.
    â€œSo I was in good shape,” he said. “I was able to save a few dollars.” Specifically, he put away $2.50 a