David Yaffe-Bellany Photo
Sweeney reaches for more condiment.s.
Bob Sweeney could see that something was wrong: A neighboring food truck had placed three water coolers on a rectangular strip of tarmac reserved for cars that drive past the line of vendors every day.
“I corrected it the next day,” said Sweeney, who runs a hotdog truck with his older brother Ed. “If someone has a problem, they come to me, and I try to give them great advice.”
Sweeney, a 76-year-old New Haven native whose slicked-back hair reveals a forehead creased with wrinkles, has been selling hot dogs from a food truck on Long Wharf for more than half a century.
Over the years, Sweeney has taken on the role of political liaison for the dozen or so trucks that assemble along Long Wharf Drive, meeting with city officials to negotiate on behalf of his fellow vendors.
Bob and Ed Sweeney next to their truck.
He has been jousting with the city since the 1970s, when he successfully petitioned officials working under then-former Mayor Frank Logue to adjust new fencing that made it more difficult for customers to reach his truck.
He claims that his hot dog van was the first food truck to open in New Haven, and that for three decades he was the only vendor working along the water at Long Wharf.
In the early 1990s, he said, he invited food truck owners from across the city to join him in an effort to turn Long Wharf into a center of mobile culinary activity. The center has now become a mecca for daily lunchers, not to mention a new annual food truck festival. It has also been an occasional source of conflict requiring government mediation.
But, Sweeney said, overall the mobile food operators are succeeding. “Each truck lives off each other,” he said. “More trucks, more people.”
Starting Early
David Yaffe-Bellany Photo
A satisfied Long Wharf customer.
Sweeney — whose current truck has dark blue wheels that match the color of the “Sweeney’s Hot Dog King” logo splashed across its side — dropped out of school at 16 to start a pushcart selling hot dogs.
“Everybody said that I was crazy: Nobody would buy a hot dog or a soda off a street vendor,” he recalled.
Everybody was wrong.
Three years later, after the birth of his first child, he expanded his business, buying a tiny Metro Mite truck from a used car dealer. He worked for as long as 18 hours a day to support his young family.
“I knew that I couldn’t support a family on 75 cents an hour and only eight hours,” he said. “I never took a welfare check.”
His first truck didn’t last long. After the motor burned out, Bob had to push the truck three miles every morning to its usual position across from the water. He waited two years to buy a replacement model: a larger vehicle that became the second of six used trucks he has churned through over the decades.
Ed, who is 78, joined his brother in the truck after serving two years in the Army. He left the service shortly before the fighting in Vietnam began to intensify, returning home to start a family in New Haven.
Ed Sweeney inside the truck.
“It’s better working for yourself than punching a clock,” Ed said. “I had to be outside.”
He leaves the political side of the enterprise to his brother.
“He’s the politician,” Ed said. “He’s the one who does the wheeling and dealing to keep the business going.”
Bob Sweeney emphasized that the two are equal partners in the business. “There’s no boss, no ego between us,” he said.
A minute later, he sprawled across the driver’s seat of the truck, watching as his brother prepare food for a waiting customer.
“I took the day off,” he said, “because I have seniority.”
“And he just said there’s no boss,” Ed replied with a smirk.
Ketchup First
Bob Sweeney at work.
Ed turned away — he was too busy filling orders to keep joshing his brother.
He loaded chili and sauerkraut onto a series of hot dogs, always applying ketchup to the bun before he added the sausage.
He had a clear goal in mind: crafting a hot dog with perfect structural integrity.
“When you put the hot dog in [before the ketchup], there’s too much on top and it rolls out on people,” he said.
“Some people want it the other way, they want the ketchup on top,” he added. “And then they see the mess that it makes.”
The Sweeney brothers said they both eat at least two hot dogs a day. Bob talked at length about the virtues of the mustard and sauerkraut topping he always applies to his dogs, calling it a nutritious combo that has remained exciting to him even after all these years.
Ed, still busy filling orders, glanced toward his brother. Then he grabbed a Pepsi from a cooler in the back of the truck and stuffed another structurally sound hot dog into a brown paper bag.
Job done.
