Famous Nathan by Mr. Lloyd Handwerker

lasted only until 1902. Other larger, more sophisticated establishments soon took its place.
    Chief among them, the holy trinity of Coney’s golden age, the Big Three: Steeplechase Park, Luna Park, and Dreamland.
    They came on in quick order. Brilliant entrepreneur George Tilyou founded Steeplechase in 1897, spending the next years constantly enlarging and refining its attractions. Luna Park opened in 1903, taking over and enlarging the footprint of the original Sea Lion Park (and, earlier, the site of the famed Elephant Hotel). A year later, the last and arguably trippiest of the Big Three, Dreamland, completed the classic Coney Island trifecta. Together, they formed a million-lightbulb “Electric Eden,” the brilliantly garish phantasmagoria that newly arriving European immigrants could glimpse from far out at sea.
    By 1914, in his post cutting rolls and waiting tables at Feltman’s, Nathan was square in the middle of the action. Dreamland burned in spring 1911, but Luna Park (“The Heart of Coney Island”) faced Feltman’s on Surf Avenue. Just past the amusement park loomed the 125-foot Iron Tower, imported from Philadelphia’s Centennial International Exhibition of 1876 and equipped with steam elevators. Seven blocks to the west was George Tilyou’s new, updated Steeplechase, easily reached by that alleyway of broken dreams, the busy, attraction-packed lane called the Bowery.
    Working at Feltman’s was like living at a three-ring circus. Across the street at Luna Park, actual premature infants inhabited a collection of baby incubators. Igorrote tribespeople from the Philippines were put on display like show animals. Freaks, geeks, and daredevils drew crowds at the sideshows of the Bowery.
    Some of the booths in the Bowery’s “Little Cairo” section offered erotic dancers, tame by modern standards, daring for the day. In fact, sex was the secret allure that permeated the whole area. Coney Island was to some extent extraterritorial, a free-fire zone where the rules and restrictive customs of society were loosened. The genders mixed. A visitor to Steeplechase, for example, might be thrown against a stranger of the opposite sex in the Barrel of Fun, the Human Pool Table, or the Whirlpool. Coney Island was promiscuous in a way even the overcrowded streets of Manhattan’s Lower East Side were not.
    Beyond the parks lay the sparkling Atlantic. Doctors had only recently begun touting the health benefits of ocean bathing. Women’s bathing suits covered torsos and extremities with a vengeance, but because they dared to show bodily forms, they were considered risqué. Men’s topless bathing remained taboo. Even children were swaddled within an inch of their lives. Yet the sensuality of bathing with thousands of strangers remained.
    Build it, and they will come. The number of visitors to Coney Island rose each season, from tens of thousands in the 1870s to the early twentieth century when on summer weekends the daily crowds routinely topped one hundred thousand. Every year, Feltman’s served more than a million customers, pumping out its shore dinners and dachshund sandwiches by the thousands.
    More than a physical reality, Coney Island began to develop a dream reality, too. What was once a deserted, sandy wasteland now situated itself in the world’s imagination like an intoxicating mirage. Postcards documenting seaside visits poured out in streams, and then rivers, and then floods. Coney Island became the most postcarded venue in the world and, even to this day, in history. On a single day in September 1906, two hundred thousand postcards were mailed from the resort town.
    Yes, Coney Island was a head-turning kind of place, and Nathan’s head spun along with everyone else’s. But where others saw mere amusement, Nathan focused on opportunity. He saw the millions funneling through gates of Culver Terminal and the nearby Sea Beach line. A thought