Crowds Outside Nathan’s Famous Hot Dog Stand on Coney Island, New York City, ca. 1955

The spiritual home of the U.S. hot dog —and the world’s largest hot dog stand—is Nathan’s Famous on Brooklyn’s Coney Island. To Nathan’s gaudy green and white stands each summer flock many of the millions of visitors to Coney, gobbling up more than 200,000 hot dogs on a weekend. Summer or winter, Nathan’s never closes. Its customers have braved blizzards just to reach a Nathan’s hot dog. The stand was originally built in 1916 by Polish immigrant Nathan Handwerker with a $300 loan; today, the restaurant chain can be found all over the world.

Crowds outside Nathan's famous hotdog stand on Coney Island, New York, ca. 1955.

The story starts in the 1910s, when the reigning hot dog king at Coney Island was Charles Feltman, who ran a successful restaurant and beer garden and supposedly invented the hot dog (or hot dog bun, more precisely). Handwerker worked for Feltman as a roll cutter and then a hot dog seller before deciding to go into business for himself with a friend.

Feltman’s and other hot dog establishments sold their franks for 10 cents each. Handwerker priced his at the same rate, but he realized he wasn’t selling enough to make a profit. So he cut the price to a nickel.

Selling hot dogs for the cost of a subway ride sounds like a smart business move. But there was a lot of concern at the time that a hot dog so cheap couldn’t be made out of beef or pork but something a lot less appetizing, like horses.

Anticipating this concern on the part of the public, Handwerker came up with a genius idea: He’d hire men to wear white doctor coats and sit around his stand enjoying the cheap franks. Handwerker “borrowed some doctor’s coats and stethoscopes from Coney Island Hospital personnel and put them on some men and had them eat franks in front of his stand. Potential customers said, “If it’s good enough for doctors, it has to be good enough for us.”

Nathan’s Famous in the 1910s or 1920s.

Sales increased, and Handwerker began attracting a devoted following. His little frankfurter stand (which didn’t even have a name for its first two years) was on its way to becoming a Coney Island classic.