Fun, American Style (cont.)

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Fun, American Style (cont.)
Coney Islands creates the cheapest hot dogs, and other cultural attractions.

Feltman's restaurant and beer garden became a Coney landmark. Eventually, his empire included a 100-foot-long pier with bath lockers, a showcase carousel, a penny arcade and a ballroom large enough to hold 3,000 dancers. Feltman died in 1910, leaving his business to his sons and grandson.

Nathan Handwerker got a job as a counterman at Feltman's restaurant in 1915. The next year he opened his own place—where the original Nathan's still stands—and promptly undercut Feltman's 10-cent price for a hot dog by 50 percent. The nickel dogs didn't immediately win over the suspicious public. One story has Handwerker dressing derelicts in white doctors' outfits and hanging a sign out front, "If doctors eat our hot dogs, you know they're good!" Apparently, that did the trick. In later years, the place sold an average of 75,000 dogs every summer weekend.

Tastes changed over the decades, but not Coney's reputation as a place where the impossible and outlandish tended to happen every noisy day and dazzling night.

Bernie Podell, 75, of San Diego, lived in Brighton Beach until he went off to war in 1943. In his youth, he says, "The rich people would go to Feltman's for hot dogs, and we would go to Nathan's. The secret to Nathan's was they had an ultra-hot grill, and the hot dogs actually burst at the casings. The Feltman's hot dogs just sat there, and you didn't get that real hot dog smell. It's the old story; with Nathan's, I think the sizzle is what sold it."

In 1920 the el reached Coney, bringing the shore and the amusements (and the hot dogs) within easy reach of millions of New Yorkers with a few nickels in their pockets. On an average summer weekend in 1905, 200,000 people came to Coney. That figure had tripled by 1915, and after 1920 the number of fun-seekers exceeded a million. And the crowds kept coming.

Three years later, the beach, no longer the preserve of various resort hotels, was opened to the public. That same year, 1923, the present boardwalk was finished, and the more affluent visitors could rent quaint wicker rolling chairs and roll up and down the 80-foot-wide expanse.

Tastes changed over the decades, but not Coney's reputation as a place where the impossible and outlandish tended to happen every noisy day and dazzling night. Luna Park, which opened in 1903 and burned down in 1944, was the incarnation of early 20th-century fantasyland. The park, built around a lagoon by Frederick Thompson and Elmer "Skip" Dundy, had a big illuminated crescent moon hanging over the entrance, and its signature ride was called A Trip to the Moon. But while that made for a convenient tie-in, the park was named after Dundy's sister, Luna. Its other rides, heavily influenced by Jules Verne's late Victorian sci-fi fantasies, included Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, the Three Ring Circus in Mid-Air, Shoot-the-Chutes (an Edwardian-era Splash Mountain) and the Fatal Wedding—and occasional cockroach races for variety.

Luna Park was famous for its gorgeous nighttime illumination of a huge number of Oriental-style domes and minarets, all done with 250,000 white lightbulbs. Russian novelist Maxim Gorki once visited Luna Park and raved, "With the advent of night, a fantastic city all of fire suddenly rises from the ocean into the sky."

Dreamland opened in 1904, a year after Luna Park, and, unfortunately, lasted only seven years before burning to the ground (the aquarium now stands on the site). Although almost nobody now alive remembers Dreamland, it must have been quite a place. Its most striking feature was a million lightbulbs, four times as many as Luna Park had. Dreamland's tower was 375 feet tall and lit from top to bottom. Reportedly, ships 50 miles at sea could see the glow from its lights. Dreamland boasted attractions like the largest ballroom in the world, built on the Iron Pier. There was also a midget village called Lilliputia, built to half scale, populated with 300 little people. It was the creation of Samuel Gumpertz and the ancestor of the legendary Coney freak shows that Gumpertz ran through the end of the 1920s.

Today, way down on the beach by its lonesome, stands the long-rusting, elegant lacework of the Parachute Jump. Sometimes called Brooklyn's Eiffel Tower, a not altogether absurd comparison, the Parachute Jump is a steel tower with a top that fans out abruptly and horizontally. It was a primitive, tamer version of a bungee jump. Hoisted patrons would be strapped into the seats and experience a sudden fall, a snap back, and then swing free. It first stood at the 1939 World's Fair; in 1941 it was moved to Coney's Steeplechase Park.

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