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All right, Dan. Set the scene.
Where are we? Right now, we're right in front of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 82nd and 50th in Manhattan.
And what are we doing here?
What are you doing here?
Well, I'm a hot dog vendor.
And my carts are right here.
Now, it's my understanding, Dan, that this spot right here where you have your hot dog cart in front of the Met is the best spot in New York City for a hot dog vendor.
It's the most recognized spot.
This has got the notoriety because at one time the gentleman who was here had cots on both sides of the steps and it was like a $300 ,000 contract he went into.
So someone paid $300 ,000 for these locations.
What do you pay? Nothing.
This is The Sporkful.
It's not for foodies, it's for eaters.
I'm Dan Pashman. Each week on our show, we obsess about food to learn more about people.
Walk down almost any block in New York City and pretty soon you'll see a street food vendor of some kind.
Whether they're selling hot dogs and pretzels, plastic cups of fresh fruit out of a cooler, or falafel and kebabs out of a halal cart.
There are over 20 ,000 street food vendors in New York City, mostly in Manhattan and Queens.
means. And street vending has been a big part of the city's fabric since before it was called New York.
It's long been a path to upward mobility for new immigrants.
Iconic foods like pizza and bagels were commonly sold on the street 100 years ago.
But for about as long as it's been going on, street vending has also been a hot button political issue.
All the fights over the years have led to a ton of rules, but those rules seem to be enforced inconsistently, if at all.
today we'll meet dan rossi who's been in the hot dog vending business for nearly a half century earning the nickname the hot dog king of new york pretty much everybody knows me now for the last 20 years dan's been vending at what the new york times once described as the most coveted location for selling a hot dog in new york the strip of pavement directly in front of of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which gets nearly 5 ,000 visitors a day.
So when people come out of the front door of the Met...
They see us. That's right.
Dan first rolled his cart onto the Met Plaza in 2007.
Since then, he's had to fight politicians, public health officials, the NYPD, the Met, and other vendors to hold on to his precious spot.
In fact, the competition between vendors is so fierce that he's implemented a sort of round -the -clock surveillance system.
I'll be here tonight.
Seven nights a week.
Seven nights a week.
Once in a blue moon, I got to be in a bed.
I got to be honest with you, I got to be in a bed.
Because I can't even stretch out in a damn van, you know.
But if this is what I have to do, I do it.
It's no big deal to me.
Yes, most nights, Dan sleeps upright in the passenger seat of his van, which he keeps parked in front of the museum to make sure no one takes his cart or his spot.
Dan is 75. He was born and raised in the Bronx, the second youngest of four boys in a big Italian family.
family. Out of everyone, he was closest to his grandma, who he says kept a jug of wine with her at all times.
Dan and his brothers and cousins helped make that wine in the basement of the railroad -style apartment he grew up in.
The grandchildren, we'd be squeezing the wine, you know, and when they got out, we would get drunk.
Everything was down there, you know, pasta.
We would do everything.
The way you do it is you lay the pasta on boards, and my grandmother would do it, it would be enough for months.
We would make food for months.
In 1967, just before his 18th birthday, Dan enlisted in the Marines, and you were sent to Vietnam.
What inspired you to enlist?
Well, I didn't want to finish high school.
I didn't want to. I hated it, you know.
But my mother insisted, and I said, okay, for you, I'm going to graduate.
I mean, my thing was, when you graduate, you go to the service, you get out, you find a girl, you find a job, and that's it.
That's all you do in life.
And I think I went to the Corps because my father was in the Corps.
And believe me, I had no clue, really, of what I was getting into until the first day.
Then I knew what I got into.
But I loved it. And you said, they sent me to Vietnam.
They sent me to Vietnam because I volunteered.
And when I got there, I came back a second time.
And if I hadn't gotten hurt, I would have been a third time.
Two months before the end of his second tour, Dan got injured on base in Da Nang.
He was repairing a helicopter that had been hitched to the back of a tractor when he slipped and caught both his legs between the wheel and the fender.
The injury gave him permanent nerve damage and was serious enough that the doctor told him his fighting days were over.
You know, I was in a lot of combat, but I never got hurt.
And then something stupid got me hurt, and one thing led to another, and they said, you're getting out of here, and that was the end of it.
So 1970, you're honorably discharged.
You come back home.
Come back to garbage.
Because this whole place hated us.
Everybody was just an atmosphere in the country I guess That we wouldn't want it It was only that You come back and when you're in something Like when you're in an attack And rockets or mortars come in You react in a certain way And when it's over, it's over We picked up bodies and then put them away And then we went back to sleep It was like nothing When I came back, all that comes back to you You don't want it to come you bury it, and that was a hard thing, you know, so I started drinking.
That was a bad thing.
Dan spent the next few years trying to readjust to civilian life.
He worked odd jobs, night shifts at a construction site, laundromat installations, and he slowly pulled himself together.
He met his future wife Angela, and now they have four daughters.
Eventually, Dan got an apprenticeship at a sheet metal factory in New Jersey.
him. One day, a co -worker asked him to build him a hot dog cart.
This guy had recently suffered a heart attack.
He wanted to quit his job in the factory and sell hot dogs.
That was his retirement plan.
So Dan built him the cart.
But then the co -worker recovered and decided not to quit, so he didn't need the cart anymore.
And he stuck me with it.
So we put an ad in the paper.
First guy who saw it said, don't show this to nobody.
I'm going to get the money.
Don't show show it to nobody.
My wife got excited.
So I said, you know what?
Let's see what this is.
Let me build another cart.
As soon as I built it, I sold it.
I built it, I sold it.
I built it. I said, holy moly.
Dan knew he was onto something.
He decided to go all in.
In 1980, he started his own push cart manufacturing company and hired a few other Vietnam vets to work at his shop.
In their first year, he says he and his guys built and sold about 200 carts.
When we started building, the only thing we actually built was the small ice cream carts and those small little hot dog carts.
Nowadays, most vendor carts are big enough that they need to be towed by cars, but these old school ones could literally be pushed down the street.
It was basically a little steel box on wheels with an umbrella.
It typically had one compartment for hot dogs, one for buns, and maybe one more area to heat up pretzels.
So Dan's cart building business was going great.
But then New York City passed a law that capped the number of mobile food vendor permits in circulation.
Before that, permits were unlimited.
Now, with the freeze, demand for new push carts plummeted.
I was just building carts and being happy as hell.
And they just, that was like shutting the door.
So I had to go get permits.
Dan kept his business afloat by buying companies that had lots of permits.
That way, his carts could come with permits, making them more valuable.
By 1990, Dan had 499 mobile food vending permits, 16 % of all the ones in the city.
I would lease the cart with the permit, five bucks a day.
When you have hundreds of them, it adds up.
So at the peak, around 1990, you had 499 permits, and it was reported that at that peak time you were making about a million dollars a year.
The company grossed over a million a year.
Gross. That's the company.
Right. But now you've got to build the costs.
You've got the overhead.
I mean, you've got to pay your employees.
It sounded like a lot of money, but, you know, I'll be honest with you.
I made about $200 ,000 a year.
That's it. But you were doing all right.
I was doing great. I was happy as hell.
You bought a house in Greenwich, Connecticut.
Very wealthy neighborhood, six -acre property.
You were doing okay at that time.
Did great. And I didn't worry about paying my bills.
My kids were in private school.
My oldest daughter was in college.
My second one was going to get ready to go to college.
I mean, we had it okay.
I still went to work every day.
The only good thing that I got personally was I bought a car.
That was it. And every Saturday I would take my wife out to dinner.
Something we've always wanted.
That was it. But as far as anything else, there was no showboating and nothing like that.
I was still me. Dan had turned his little operation into an empire.
A profile in the New York Times dubbed him the king of pushcarts.
But things were changing politically in New York in ways that would profoundly affect Dan's business.
I'll place a much greater emphasis on stricter enforcement of the law to reverse the growing trend of ever -increasing tolerance for lawless behavior.
J -walking is a fact of life here.
No more, says Mayor Giuliani.
In general, you're trying to civilize New York.
We're working on it.
In 1994, newly elected Mayor Rudy Giuliani launched his Quality of Life campaign, aimed at quote -unquote cleaning up New York City's streets.
And he made food vendors a prime target, saying they clogged streets and sidewalks.
Giuliani said it was a public health and safety issue.
And he had a well -known ally in his effort.
You would hear on the radio this guy whining about the streets look like they're in Bangladesh and all this.
It was Donald Trump.
Trump complained about vendors outside his newly -constructed Trump Tower on Fifth Avenue.
Dan says a lot of those vendors were immigrants and disabled veterans.
He didn't like street vendors.
He didn't want people in the street.
He didn't want us in the street.
As I said at the start, there have been efforts to ban street vending in New York City for about as long as New Yorkers have vended, which dates back centuries.
But in the 1990s, the Giuliani administration was determined to crack down.
First, they restricted where in the city vendors could go, taking away a lot of prime real estate.
The city's street vendor review panel has approved a number of proposals that would ban food and other vendors from 144 blocks in Manhattan, including parts of the financial district in Times Square.
Many of the complaints from business improvement districts say the street sellers cause congestion.
They shut almost 100 streets in Midtown.
Then the hammer really dropped.
As part of the crackdown, the city passed a law that said nobody could own more than one permit.
Giuliani said this would, quote, restore the city's vending industry to what it was intended to be, a business of small, independent entrepreneurs.
But for Dan, whose business was built on leasing pushcarts with permits...
That was the end. So basically overnight, you had to go from 499 permits to one.
And we had to shut down.
It was hard. It was really bad.
Dan was forced to declare bankruptcy.
And the home he'd purchased in Connecticut just a few years before was foreclosed on.
He and his wife were left living in a rented van.
Nowhere to go. We had nowhere to go.
Now if you ask Dan, he'll tell you that everything that happened to the mobile food vending industry in the 80s and 90s was all a conspiracy to take him down.
As a guy with a lot of permits, he did exemplify one of the problems the mayor's office said they were trying to solve, an ownership concentration in the industry.
I own 499 permits. I'm the big bad guy.
You gotta knock me down.
Dan considered suing the city to get his permits back.
But around this time, his wife developed some health problems. I told my wife, I said, you know, we got a few bucks in the bank and we can walk away from all this.
And she says, who are you talking to?
She says, you're not going to allow them to do this to us.
You're going to fight.
I said, they're going to take our shoes.
She said, let them take our shoes.
And they did. But it had a tremendous effect on our health.
You know, there's no question that what I did caused her to have a stroke.
There's no question, in my mind.
So Dan did fight. Once his wife was in better shape, he sued the city several times over the next few years.
But all his complaints were dismissed.
In one suit, the judge ruled that the city was not targeting Dan unfairly or enforcing rules differently than they were against other vendors.
He was never able to recover all those permits.
Coming up, Dan tries to claw his way back into the vending game.
With help from an obscure law that dates to the Civil War.
I still got one permit they left me.
I said, you know what?
I'm going to sell hot dogs.
But it doesn't sound like that was the end of the troubles.
That was the beginning.
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Welcome back to The Sporkful.
I'm Dan Pashman, and I have hot dogs on the brain.
It's not just because of this episode.
Fourth of July weekend's coming up, and this Friday we have another really fun show about hot dogs.
It's about two legendary hot dog joints.
One in Detroit, one in New Jersey, both of them over 100 years old.
Back in the 1920s, Red Hot's in Detroit catered to thousands of hungry workers at the Ford plant, serving Chili and Coney Island dogs, a Detroit specialty.
But they've had to get creative to stay afloat in recent years.
Then we go to my home state of New Jersey, where Rutz Hut is famous for, get this, deep -fried hot dogs known as Rippers.
This place is very special to me, and in the episode, there's even a cameo from my parents.
My mom told me a story about the time she and my dad came to Rutz Hut after she had been in the hospital.
and we stopped here afterwards for a hot dog because it was sort of like a treat.
Some people stop for an ice cream cone.
We went into the stand, and I started eating my hot dog, and I didn't feel right.
I thought it was going to pass out, so Dad walked me to the car and told me to put my head down, and I'm waiting, and I think he's going to come around to the other side of the car and get in.
I'm waiting, I'm waiting, and finally I look up.
He's not there. He went back in to finish my hot dog.
this episode is one of my all -time favorites and it's gonna be this friday's reheat so i want to make sure you check it out in other recent reheats we've nerded out on the science of carbonation and had a thoughtful conversation with nigella lawson so i hope you'll check all those recent releases out okay back to dan rossi after new york city stripped him of all but one of his 499 street vending permits he lost everything he felt like he failed his family He went back to working odd jobs and eventually saved up enough money to rent an apartment for him and his wife.
Then one summer day in 2007...
I get a phone call from a disabled vet.
He's in trouble. He sells the t -shirts and stuff.
He says, Dan, I'm in front of the Met.
He says, and what they did was right here.
They put one of the little Cushman vehicles where he had his spot.
He was selling right here.
Dan gestures to the spot we're standing in now.
And they put it there to get him out.
the NYPD had parked a vehicle where the vet was trying to sell t -shirts to deter him from vending in front of the museum hearing that enraged Dan more than a decade had passed since the city took his permits but his feeling of injustice was still fresh the vet that called him for help packed up his stuff that day and never came back but it gave Dan an idea I said you know what I still got one permit they left me I'm gonna sell hot dogs and I don't have to pay anything.
That's true. And the reason dates back to a very old law.
It came about a few years after the Civil War, and there was nothing for them.
For the veterans. They were in bad shape.
So a federal law came down mandating that every state must come up with something for the vets so that they can work.
And New York came up with this, where any disabled veteran can work on any street.
You know, not just selling food.
If you want to sell, you want to hawk newspapers.
They can't stop you from doing it.
Regular vendors can't sell outside the Met without paying a huge extra fee because it's considered part of a park.
But a disabled vet can sell there for free, thanks to this old law.
So Dan had found a loophole.
The next day, he returned with his permit and a hot dog cart.
When I came, I didn't come here.
I took the cart down to 79th Street.
That's a few blocks down from the Met.
Still a park area, but with less foot traffic.
I didn't want to start any trouble.
I I wanted to just, things were really bad for me.
I was trying to get back on my feet.
And naturally, they came and they started to harass me.
The cops and the cops.
And they started writing me tickets.
And I said, look, guys, leave me alone.
You guys just don't want trouble with me.
They came, and every time they came, I said, okay, I'm talking two, three times a day.
Next time you come, I move 10 feet closer to the center.
I said, all right, keep talking, I said.
And when I got here, I said, now what are you going to do?
They arrested me. The charges were eventually dropped.
And the beauty of that was that when I came back the next day, nobody bothered me.
I knew I was right.
And from that day on, I'm here.
As a disabled vet, Dan has the right to sell hot dogs smack dab in the middle of the Met Plaza.
And now that he has his spot, he's not leaving it for anything, even if it means sleeping in his van every night.
This is survival now.
We don't work. We don't eat.
And I know what homeless is now, to be homeless.
It's not going to happen to my wife again.
It's not going to happen.
But even sleeping by his spot hasn't stopped city health officials and the NYPD from harassing, ticketing, and arresting him.
Dan even spent a night in jail in 2009 for refusing to move his cart.
Every year for the last four years, not this year so far, but the last four years, they would come and shut me down for some reason, scrape off my decals, put a stop work notice on there, and never was I ever found in violation of anything.
The irony, Dan says, is he's the only one actually following the law around here.
On the day we met up to talk, there were nine other food vendors in front of the Met.
A coffee cart, a couple of halal carts, a truck selling bubble tea.
And you're telling me everyone in this block, except for you, shouldn't be here?
That's right. When Dan started setting up in front of the Met, it encouraged other vendors to follow suit, even if they weren't run by disabled veterans.
Carts started to come.
And what these street vendors would do is they would find a veteran, they'd call him a rent -a -vet.
That was the term that they got.
You know, give me $100, I'll sit by your car all day.
That way they can claim that the law protects them.
They can claim that it's a vet.
You know, they're here now.
There's a dozen of them right in front of us.
According to a report from the Immigration Research Initiative, three -quarters of mobile food vendors in New York City today are operating illegally.
Not by using vets, but simply by vending without permits.
The reason is that it's virtually impossible to get a permit today because of that cap put in place back in the 80s.
It's led to a black market where permit holders lease permits to vendors at exorbitant rates.
We're talking tens of thousands of dollars for a permit that the city sells for $200.
So for most would -be vendors just trying to scrape by, it makes more sense to skip the permit and take their chances on the street.
But that's an increasingly big risk.
It can lead to fines of up to $1 ,000.
And many of those vending without permits are undocumented immigrants, which means if they do get busted, they could face deportation.
In the past few years, enforcement has been on the rise.
And for the second time in a matter of days, a woman selling churros at a subway station detained by New York cops.
The NYPD commissioner made a special trip here today after his cops issued eight summonses and seized a lot of property from these vendors.
They want to get permits and licenses, but argue the system works against them.
In a statement, Mayor Eric Adams said street vendors are vital to the city, but that unregulated street vending is a quality -of -life concern.
Twice as many tickets were issued to vendors last year versus the year before.
And since Trump took office and made mass deportations a priority, some New York City food vendors have stopped working.
A package of bills currently before the city council will try to address these issues by decriminalizing vending, making more permits available, and reducing some of the risks of deportation.
Advocates are hoping the bills will go to a vote this summer.
As for Dan Rossi, these days he's mostly focused on selling hot dogs.
Since he's gotten back on his feet, back in the game, he says he's making about $50 ,000 a year after expenses.
That's working nearly every single day of the year.
Vending is a seasonal business, so these are the months that really count.
But so far this spring...
It's going to be a really tough one for us this year.
Because even though you see a lot of people, there's no lines.
lines we used to have lines on the car going up the steps those days are all gone because there's so many other vendors here because they're the vendors and the climate of the city now if you can't feel that there's friction there's something wrong with what's going on in the country right now there's no tourism tourism is way down you know i had someone from france come the other day i said why would you even come here the guys insulted everybody she says you're right we don't like this guy so they're not coming canada's not coming I mean, everybody, Chinese are not here.
Chinese were the greatest thing we ever had.
They're not here. I mean, come on, that's our customer base.
They're not here. Now that Dan and I had covered his story and the issues vendors face, it was time to get down to brass tacks.
What's the secret to a great hot dog?
Oh, the hot dogs that we sell, we use a flat grill.
So it's not sitting in the boiling water?
Don't even say water.
the combination of the of the best hot dog we're going to find on the grill and knowing how to cook it you know you don't burn it you do it right that's the thing what's the brand of hot dog kirkland costco brand i passed by this brand for years i wouldn't even look at it until one day we picked it up and that was it then when the customers started coming ketchup or mustard Mustard. Oh, always mustard. I shiver when they say ketchup.
See, I'm a combo. I like both.
I like them together.
Well, a lot of people like them both.
Final question, Dan.
Can I get two hot dogs?
You can have two hot dogs or you want.
All right, I'm ready to order a couple.
Good! All right. First bite of the hot dog.
That is phenomenal.
And you know what? Cooking it on the griddle makes a big difference.
And this is also just the right amount of ketchup and mustard. Some of them overdo it.
I don't want to drown my hot dog.
Is it that good? It's really good.
Your expression gives it all.
You might want to get two.
I had an empire once.
I was king of this town.
Everybody knew I wore the hot dog crown.
I had vendors hustling on every street.
serving up the people with good food to eat but the city tried to outlaw us tried to ride us over like a downtown bus took away our permits and our rights to sell took away my business gave me living hell i was a hot dog king new york city the hot dog king new york city was a hot dog king That's Dan Rossi, the hot dog king of New York.
If you want to meet him and try his hot dogs, you know where to find him, right in front of the Met.
This Friday, we're continuing our 4th of July coverage of hot dogs with a reheat of our classic episode, This Hot Dog Tastes Like Home.
It includes a trip to Detroit for Coney dogs and a cameo for my parents.
I love this one. Make sure you listen.
While you wait for that episode, check out our recent show about what happened when a restaurant critic visited the famed French Laundry in Napa and had an unexpected and somewhat surreal experience with celebrity chef Thomas Keller.
That one's up now. And hey, did you know you can listen to The Sporkful on the SiriusXM app?
Yes, the SiriusXM app, it has all your favorite podcasts, plus over 200 ad -free music channels curated by genre and era.
Plus live sports coverage.
Does your podcasting app have that?
and there's interviews with A -list stars and so much more.
It's everything you want in a podcast app and music app all rolled into one.
And right now, Sporkful listeners can get three months free of the SiriusXM app by going to SiriusXM .com slash Sporkful.
Special thanks for this episode to Louis Pugh and the Burner Band.
This episode was produced by me along with managing producer Emma Morgenstern and senior producer Andres O 'Hara and producer Grace Rubin Our engineer is Jared O 'Connell Music help from Black Label Music.
The Sporkful is a production of Stitcher Studios.
Our executive producer is Camille Stanley.
Until next time, I'm Dan Pashman.
And I'm Brittany from Raway, New Jersey, reminding you to eat more, eat better, eat more better.
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