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The Strange and Surprising Story of the Coney Island Hotdog Contest
The man who started it all in 1916 nearly died of starvation in Europe
The Coney Island amusement park might be closed, but nothing could stop Nathan’s Famous International Hot Dog Eating Contest. Spectators weren’t allowed to watch in person, and competitors were separated by clear barriers. Hotdogs disappeared down competitors’ mouths nonetheless.
Every Fourth of July, the corner of Stillwell and Surf avenues in Brooklyn, New York, is transformed into a media circus, with ESPN broadcasting live an event that for at least an hour.
In past years, tens of thousands of people crowded close, breathing in the odor of fried food mixed with salt air, stepping over thick television cables, hearing the screams of seagulls overhead, to witness it. Boosted by the popularity of competitive eating, the 4th of July contest became “Major League Eating’s Super Bowl, so to speak,” said sportswriter Mark J. Burns in a Forbes column.
It’s a Super Bowl with stars, no less. On Saturday, July 4, 2020, Joey Chestnut, 37, the defending champion, devoured 75 weiners and buns in 10 minutes to win his 13th title. At the 8-minute mark, Chestnut made history by eating his 1,000th career dog.
A former construction manager, Chestnut is believed to earn more than $200,000 a year on the competitive eating circuit.
One wonders what the man who started it all — Nathan Handwerker — would make of this feat today.
In 1916, he launched what became a hot dog empire with a small stand on the same corner. A near-illiterate shoemaker’s son accustomed to 18-hour workdays, at 19 he had left Poland and a family that hovered on the brink of starvation to follow his dream. “We were seven brothers and six sisters and we didn’t have a lot to eat,” says Handwerker in the excellent 2015 documentary Famous Nathan.
That Nathan Handwerker should end up a beloved fixture of Coney Island is perhaps not so surprising, for this stretch of beach in southwest Brooklyn drew the most audacious of all dreamers for decades.
