The New York Times
April 6, 2001

Pulling Coney Island's Sweet Tooth

By NICHOLE M. CHRISTIAN

After 54 years of making and selling candy apples, taffy and chocolate at Philip's, John Dorman is closing the shop.

In the days when Coney Island was a summertime playground for millions of American families, Philip's, a little red- and-white candy stand on Surf Avenue, was impossible to bypass.

It was the first thing visitors saw as they left the Stillwell Avenue subway terminal, and it was as much a part of the Coney Island experience as a whirl on the Cyclone or a stroll down the Boardwalk. The hot candied apples, the clouds of cotton candy, the bananas gooey with chocolate coating. All Old World recipes, all handmade. Sugar, butter, milk. Heaven.

Philip's Candy has been turning out sticky delights for 70 years. John Dorman has been its owner, its confectionery chemist, its hands and heart, for 54 of them. He was there in the halcyon days, when a jaunt to Coney Island was as much a slice of Americana as going to the ballpark. And he was there for the bad times, too, when the amusement parks closed and the neighborhood became a cliché for urban decay.

But on Easter Sunday, the day Coney Island's season opens, a day many candy lovers live for, Mr. Dorman, 71, will be there for the last time. New York City Transit is embarking on a five-year, $220 million overhaul of the rusted terminal, and Philip's Candy, its lone commercial tenant, will have to be torn down.

Mr. Dorman says he is not bitter, but he cannot help feeling sad, especially from a perch where he can hear and see signs of Coney Island's long-awaited resurrection. A few feet away is the ballpark where this summer a farm team of the Mets, the Brooklyn Cyclones, will bring professional baseball back to Brooklyn for the first time in 44 years. There is constant hammering and drilling at the terminal's Surf Avenue entrance. Workers are boarding up everything except his stand.

"It's like listening to somebody put nails in your coffin," said Mr. Dorman, who was 17 when he first started mopping floors, spinning sugar and wrapping taffy. "How can I hold up something that's going to make Coney Island good again? We had our good times. It would be unfair for me to make a big noise."

Mr. Dorman has asked his customers to let him go quietly, and talks about perhaps opening a new shop somewhere else in Brooklyn. But devotees of Philip's can't hide their disappointment.

They are people like Marie Biuso of Bensonhurst, who several times a week cajoles friends with cars into helping her satisfy a craving for frozen bananas, cotton candy and chocolate-covered strawberries. And Richard Behrman, who drives a bus for New York City Transit and has stopped at the stand every day for the last 14 years, devoted to Mr. Dorman's chocolate-covered pretzels and the friendly faces behind the window. And James Woolridge, 11, who lives 20 blocks away, on the edge of Coney Island, and catches a livery cab three times a week to press his face against the window, survey bags of pink popcorn, chocolate bars, 10- pound rainbow lollipops and jelly- coated apples, his favorite.

For Dan Pisark, a Coney Island native who grew up feasting on chocolate malteds and feeding Philip's peanuts to the sea gulls, the loss is painful. "It breaks your heart that such a genuine piece of Coney Island, a real throwback, is just being swept away," said Mr. Pisark, 49.

Like many of the stand's loyalists, Mr. Pisark says the candy shop is no ordinary business. "It's not just nostalgia; it's a viable shop with products you don't find today." Now a diabetic, Mr. Pisark visits the stand just to chat with Mr. Dorman or to buy candy for his daughter. For her 16th birthday party, he bought 40 boxes of chocolate cashew clusters.

Since 1931, Philip's has been Coney Island's unofficial welcome center, its candy-cane-colored signs and sweet aromas beckoning visitors and residents alike. "When they get here, they buy a hot dog at Nathan's and dessert from Philip's," said Mr. Dorman's partner, Peggy Cohn, 54, who started out bagging saltwater taffy for him when she was 15. On a strip where many stores sit empty or closed till summer, Philip's is a rare bright spot, the place where candy that can take hours to make still sells for less than a dollar, and where the counter is open year-round, from 11 a.m. to 3 a.m.

Both Ms. Cohn and Mr. Dorman say they are lucky to have been in business as long they have. And even luckier that they were able to run the business like they learned it, the old- fashioned way. Long hours, without the aid of fancy machines, not even an electronic cash register. When they are not chatting up customers, they huddle in the back cooking cashews, spinning cotton candy and preparing the beloved jelly apples, tossing a few at a time into copper kettles, where they are bathed in hot red jelly or rich chocolate.

That he is still making such recipes is amazing to Mr. Dorman, a native of Staten Island. "It was just supposed to be a summer job," he said. "It turned into a whole lifetime." In 1956, he bought the store from its original owner, Philip Calermaris. There he met his wife, Audrey, who worked the counter at a 15- cent milk stand behind the candy shop. It was Audrey, he said, who helped perfect the recipes, since he never liked the taste of candy, preferring a good piece of Italian bread.

They married, moved into an apartment across the street from the Steeplechase and had three children, all of whom worked at the stand, making change, washing pots and eventually cooking candy. Mrs. Dorman died eight years ago.

On a tour of Surf Avenue recently, Mr. Dorman recalled Coney Island's heyday, much of which he witnessed from the window at Philip's. He was around when it was still safe to walk the Boardwalk in the hours before dawn, days when the beach was so packed with people you could hardly see the sand. He also remembers what he calls the hot dog wars, the days in the 50's and 60's when small- time hot dog shops tried to outdo Nathan's Famous. "People waited in line in the streets," he said. Back then, "all of America came here to play."

Philip's has outlived all of its neighbors at the subway terminal. Mr. Dorman said New York City Transit's plans to renovate the station were no secret. They had been talked about for years, but the work never seemed to materialize. "They could have asked me to leave years ago when everyone else did," he said. There is talk that when the new terminal opens in 2005, Philip's will be among the first commercial tenants considered. "I don't believe the transit authority is out to hurt Philip's," said Mr. Dorman's son John Philip, who was named after the stand's founder and is general manager of the University Club in Manhattan. "They've said they will do what they can for us."

Lisa Schwartz, a transit spokeswoman, said, "We're working with him to make his transition as smooth as possible as he closes his business."

Still, to some customers, the city picked the worst possible time. "He put up with the T.A. letting that station go to pieces for years," said Charles Denson, who lives in San Francisco but grew up in Coney Island, eating chocolate jelly bars from Philip's. "But now that baseball is coming to Coney Island, the T.A. has decided there is money to be made, so he's being kicked out. Nobody deserves to be part of there more than Philip's."

People get passionate about Philip's. Now they come to its window (they never enter, it's too small), order their goodies and openly mourn. "It's like being in a funeral parlor, the way they come up crying and offering to make a fuss for us," Mr. Dorman said, as one of his faithful customers patted him on the back. "It hurts to see that; the people here have been good to me. Never had a bad day."

The stand, which has no security system, has never been robbed or vandalized.When it closes next week, Philip's will be just another vanished piece of Coney Island history, like the long- gone Steeplechase Park, Dreamland and the Thunderbolt. And now that the window where Mr. Dorman watched it all is about to be destroyed, he said he has no regrets. In fact, Mr. Dorman said he was eager to see if the new terminal, along with the ballpark, accomplishes what he dreamed about for decades — making Coney Island a destination again.

"In a few short years, this whole place is going to be better," he said. "It may be a little tougher for the little guy, but there will be people coming here. I hope I'm here to see it, but if not, I'll be somewhere making candy."