In January of 2007, when we first started shooting the Little Bytes, the Guggenheim was still under scaffolding and there were only two hot dog carts in front of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The rent paid to the Parks Department for those two carts exceeded $600,000 per year. A reminder:
Today there's a small fleet of those carts. Last year I wrote about the veteran who started selling from a third cart at the steps. He paid no rent, charged less and ignored a stack of police summonses. Others have followed his example. Taking advantage of the same nineteenth-century state law that permitted veterans to sell in areas without paying rent, more carts have rolled up to the steps. There are even claims that certain vendors are actually hiring veterans (rent-a-vets) to sit and sell their products so they can avoid paying the city rent.
Read the Adam Lisberg piece in The Daily News (about the eviction of the vendor who is $310,000 behind in his rent) or the Simon Akam article in the Times (about those who have moved in).
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