Hot dogs encased in bagel dough appeared, along with other gimmicks. ![]() By the ’80s, according to Phil McCann, Nathan’s senior marketing director, there were no family members left at the company and it became a corporation with franchises. “My sister was a big fan and her style of babysitting me when I was little was to sit me on a bench and go binge-riding on the Cyclone for hours,” says Sanger, who eventually started going on it himself, too. But it is the Cyclone, the venerable wooden roller coaster built in 1927 and now part of Luna Park, that has always been the great draw. And though the original park shut down in 1944, there’s a newer version now that shares its name and boasts the Thunderbolt, a ride that drops its passengers from 115 feet at 56 miles per hour. “It had bumper cars and sliding wooden horses on a polished, heavily shellacked wooden track,” recalls Sanger, and a clown’s face painted over the entrance that “scared me to death and also looked very much like the original Batman Joker.” Luna Park, founded in 1903, was best known for A Trip to the Moon, an electrically powered mechanical ride, inspired by Jules Verne’s 1865 novel “From the Earth to the Moon,” that resembled a spacecraft. There was Steeplechase Park, built in 1897, which remained open until 1964. Still, the fabulous amusement parks survived, including the three greats. To entertain the rich, three racetracks were opened beginning in 1879 they eventually attracted gamblers and gangsters - “Sodom-by-the-Sea,” The New York Times called Coney Island in 1893 - and by 1910, they were all shut down. Visitors arrived by railroad, ferry and trolley, by private carriage and yacht. Hotels and bathing pavilions went up along much of the south Brooklyn seacoast, including Brighton Beach to the east of Coney Island and Manhattan Beach beyond. “I remember as a skinny kid seeing more fat, naked old men than I could ever have imagined in one place.”Īlthough Manhattanites vacationed in the area as early as the 1840s and ’50s, it wasn’t until after the Civil War that it really took off. “And, of course, Nathan’s also had great crinkle-cut French fries and fried clams to die for,” says Sanger, who liked to follow his meal with a stroll to the boardwalk, past the Silver’s Baths, where men would soak in saltwater pools or sweat in saunas. Sitting in the sun, I look up at the stand’s signage, which is not shy about announcing its other gustatory pleasures: lobster rolls, cheeseburgers and fried frog’s legs (which became popular in the 1940s, Miller tells me, when G.I.s returned from World War II with fond memories of French cuisine). By 2001, there were outposts in every state and in multiple countries around the world. Murray Handwerker, Nathan’s son, expanded the business with a branch in Long Island in 1959 and another in Yonkers in 1965. In a sense, Nathan’s was among the very first great fast-food restaurants. Millions of immigrants, including my own grandfather, had arrived in New York during the previous three decades and they were always looking for a good, cheap meal. ![]() Nathan, a Jewish immigrant who had left his native Galicia (now part of Poland) only four years earlier and barely spoke English, was just 24 when he set up his stand. I do know that they are still made with the special seasoning mix that Handwerker’s wife, Ida Handwerker, dreamed up in 1916. ![]() When I ask my lunch companion, Bruce Miller, Nathan’s senior director of company operations, who has been with the company for 40 years, what gives the dogs their flavor, he tells me it’s a closely guarded secret. Already I can smell the ineluctable scent of a Nathan’s Famous hot dog.įor me, the magic of that old Brooklyn was Passover dinner at my Aunt Lil’s in Flatbush, my father’s brothers kvetching about the departure of the Brooklyn Dodgers from Ebbets Field in 1957 - they would be mad about it for decades - and those trips to Coney Island in the late 1950s, when it was a child’s dreamscape of rides and food, of beach and boardwalk, and we would return home sunburned, stuffed with banana frozen custard and drowsy from the day’s delights. ![]() The Atlantic Ocean looks exactly as it used to - a deep cerulean blue - and the first little girl I see has pink cotton candy stuck in her hair. It’s a luminous July morning when I arrive in Coney Island and I feel the same excitement I did when I was 9 and, on warm summer Sundays, my father and I would leave our apartment in Manhattan and drive to this southernmost coast of Brooklyn. In this series for T, the author Reggie Nadelson revisits New York institutions that have defined cool for decades, from time-honored restaurants to unsung dives.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |