Free Famous Nathan by Mr. Lloyd Handwerker Page B

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.
    He had to pick himself up and start all over again. After the setback, he simply continued with his program of long workdays and the painstaking, week-by-week putting away of a few dollars. He didn’t go out much. He lived a frugal life. The whole routine was difficult. Somehow he kept his spirits up under the strain. Nathan didn’t broadcast the news, but inside, he nurtured a secret dream.

 
    6
    The Store

    â€œI’ll be there seven days a week, and I’m making five cents a frankfurter.” Nathan’s Famous, ca. 1920, looking south on Seaside Walk.
    HUMANS HAD BEEN plundering the fat of Coney’s land for a long time. Even before the coming of the Europeans, the Lenape and Carnarsie tribes mined Coney Island’s shores for oyster shells to turn into strings of seawan, or wampum currency. In the modern era, one political boss after another milked the place as a cash cow.
    The more things changed, though, the more they remained the same. Coney Island, as Nathan encountered it in 1914, was in the process of shedding one nickname, “Sodom by the Sea,” in favor of another, “America’s Playground.” Coney Island could have been pried out of the hands of private interests and developed into a people’s park. Instead, it was sliced and diced like a hog at a rendering plant.
    Real reform was a few years down the line. The boardwalk was piecemeal: a section in front of Steeplechase Park, another farther to the east, all privately owned. A continuous oceanfront public promenade was as of yet just a proposal of a few progressives. Access to the ocean was still a hit-or-miss proposition, with large sections of the beach controlled and fenced off by private bathhouses, hotels, and beer gardens (including Feltman’s).
    The legality of all this was murky. Property titles along the beach were notoriously tangled, a state of affairs that allowed moneyed interests to elbow aside local leaseholders.
    But in the early years of the twentieth century, a magical transformation happened. Somehow, despite pressures from all sides, Coney Island was in the process of stumbling into its golden age.
    â€œIt is blatant, it is cheap, it is the apotheosis of ridiculous, but it is something more,” author, screenwriter, and New York bon vivant Reginald Wright Kauffman wrote of Coney Island in 1909. “It is like Niagara Falls or the Grand Canyon or Yellowstone Park. It is a national playground and not to have seen it is not to have seen your own country.”
    That summer of 1909, twenty million fun-seekers trekked to Coney Island. Among them was Sigmund Freud, on his first and only visit to the United States. The good doctor labeled America “a mistake, a giant mistake,” but claimed that Coney Island was the only thing about the country that interested him.
    Credit for this has to be given to the growth of the American amusement park, which swept up the area in a sort of riot of the imagination.
    The country’s first roller coaster opened at Coney Island in 1884, a gravity-powered prototype that hit a kiddie-ride speed of six miles an hour. A year later, Sea Lion Park became the first enclosed amusement park in the country. With its sole popular attraction, the Water Chute, it