As it turns out, the real secret ingredient to Nathan’s Famous hot dogs is love.
And that love will be commemorated at 11 a.m. this Saturday when City Council Member Mark Treyger and a host of Coney Island residents and civic leaders will co-name the Surf and Stillwell Avenues corner where the original Nathan’s Famous Restaurant remains to this day for its founders, “Nathan and Ida Handwerker Way.”
Polish-born Nathan Handwerker immigrated to the United States at the age of 20, one of 13 children of a poor Jewish shoemaker. While working for Feltman’s German Gardens in Coney Island, slicing bread rolls for what was then called ‘”franks,” Handwerker met his wife Ida Greenwald, another Polish immigrant, after she caught his eye amidst her work at a Brooklyn food stand. The two fell in love and married in October 1918.
While the official Nathan’s history on its website has Handwerker starting the now world renown franchise in 1916, other accounts have the Handwerkers investing their life savings of $300 on a small hot dog stand with a two-foot grill on the corner of Surf and Stillwell Avenues.
They spiced their hot dogs with Ida’s secret recipe, which she learned from her mother, and sold them for a nickel, undercutting Feltman’s, which sold them for a dime. The Handwerkers went on to have three children while working together in their Coney Island restaurant for over 50 years. Nathan passed just three years after his retirement on March 24, 1974. Ida died Dec. 24, 1976.
The co-naming is one of three slated in the next month for Coney Island. The others include the Oct. 13 co-naming of Mermiad Avenue and West 16th Street as “Pastor Debbe Santiago Way” and the other is the Oct. 17 co-naming of West Avenue, between Ocean Parkway and West 5th Street as “Captain MIchael E. Bery Way.
Santiago founded the Salt and Sea Mission which helped feed, clothe, and house the hungry in Coney Island for over 25 years. Santiago overcame her own struggles of addiction and crime to become a spiritual and programmatic leader of South Brooklyn, and is credited with saving a good amount of homeless and drug addicted people who often lived underneath and around the famed Coney Island Boardwalk as well as helping scores of people who come from the largely impoverished western end of Coney Island. She died of cancer in February of this year.
Berdy grew up in the Coney Island gated community of Sea Gate and was a graduate of the United States Military Academy at West Point, class of 1965. He was commissioned as an infantry second lieutenant and assigned to the 2-8 Airborne of the 1st Cavalry Division and deployed to the central highlands of Vietnam. After being wounded in combat, Berdy was given the option to return home, he instead chose to return to the front lines.
On December 26, 1967, just days before his 24th birthday, he was one of seven passengers killed in a helicopter crash in South Vietnam. He was posthumously awarded a Purple Heart Medal, and Coney Island’s P.S. 188 – the elementary school Berdy attended as a child – was renamed the Michael E. Berdy School.
“As a former educator, I believe it is imperative that we as a community do not lose sight of our past,” said Treyger. “Southern Brooklyn has as rich and storied a tradition as any other area in New York City, and the individuals we are recognizing this year have each made a positive impact on this community in their own special way.”
