Read Online Famous Nathan by Mr. Lloyd Handwerker - Free Book Online Page B

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