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The location, on Roosevelt Road a couple of blocks east of Harlem, had been a hot dog stand called Parky’s since World War II, which Brendan O’Connor went to as a kid growing up in the area. It closed in 2001 and had stood dilapidated for a few years, he says, when he became interested in getting out of sales and carrying on the tradition of a neighborhood hot dog joint, but with a modern twist—”more contemporary cuisine, but good and not pretentious stuff.”
O’Connor still lives a few blocks away, and this is actually his second venture as a hot dog vendor—as a teenager he would help a friend, whose family owned a Frank Lloyd Wright house in Oak Park, run a makeshift hot dog stand once a year when the Frank Lloyd Wright houses held an open house. “We would put up a stand and a charcoal grill and sell coffee, hot dogs, and pop, and we’d call it Wright Lloyd Franks,” he says. (You knew that was coming.) “Once a year, we would strike gold out there. We cleaned up then, for being 15 and 16 years old.” By the time he was downsized from a sales job, he had been running a catering company from his house, and he took his severance and joined up with some friends to take over the old Parky’s location.
