The 100 Greatest Brooklynites of All Time: 70 to 61
Selby, Sr., a Kentuckyan, eventually settled down up north with his wife in Bay Ridge, where they bore and raised their son Hubert, Jr. “Bay Ridge, I think, is the same for the last 80 years,” he told an interviewer in 1999. “With a few physical exceptions.” It’s the working class people from those unchanging streets (and those in surrounding neighborhoods)—the brawlers and drinkers and druggies and sex workers—that inhabited his manically prosed novels, starting with 1964’s classic Last Exit to Brooklyn, which also became the subject of a landmark British censorship case. Selby left Brooklyn three years later for Los Angeles, where he died in 2004.
After borrowing $300 from his friends Eddie Cantor and Jimmy Durante—still singing-waiters at Feltman’s, where Handwerker cut rolls, and not yet the superstars they’d become—Nathan opened his own hot dog stand in Coney Island in 1916, undercutting his former employer by charging half the price: a nickel. Thus did a 24-year-old Polish Jew begin the business that his son Murray would turn into an empire, making the name synonymous with the food.