Another day, another vanishing NYC icon. Papaya King has sold hot dogs and tropical juices on the corner of 86th Street and 3rd Avenue since the 1940s. But last year, the lot where the restaurant sits was purchased by Extell Development for $21 million. While the eatery has not yet been evicted, demolition plans for the building have been filed. Extell is known for building high-rise luxury towers, such as the Central Park Tower, the tallest residential building in the world.
The business was founded in 1932 by Gus Poulos, a Greek immigrant (hmm, funny how many of these histories feature immigrants). Originally, Gus just sold tropical fruit drinks, which he'd developed a passion for while on vacation in Florida. However, the largely German population of the neighborhood didn't know what papayas or guava even were. As his son, Peter, explained in this interview, "People did not know what these juices were. So he had to spend a lot of time and money giving away these juices every day to the public - and literature, trying to educate them what papaya is, what this fruit was, that fruit was." Eventually, Poulos added something to the menu that Germans did know - frankfurters - and thus Papaya Dog was born. Its success spawned a number of similarly-named restaurants, such as Gray's Papaya and Papaya Dog.
The business was passed on to Peter Poulos, Gus' son, who sold it to another owner in the early 2000s. Now that the end of Papaya Dog is near, Poulos sounds sanguine about it. "It's too valuable of a corner to make it a one-story building. It's like everything else. Everything has to come to an end eventually."
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