Dueling hot dog vendors jockey for prime turf in rebuilding Coffey Park

During a lull in business Friday morning, Gabriel Heskett walked from his hot dog stand to his car 20 yards away.

“Look,” said Lowell Bryan, regarding his nemesis on the other side of Hopper Avenue in Coffey Park, “he’s taking his money box with him. He doesn’t trust me.”

Bryan, 71, is the proprietor of Edna’s Hot Dogs, the name a tribute to his late mother, a superb cook “who is probably turning over in her grave,” her son said.

Heskett, whose neatly trimmed beard makes him appear older than his 16 years, festoons his stand with balloon animals - a smart play for the kids market, which will grow as more families move back into the Santa Rosa neighborhood torched by the 2017 Tubbs fire.

They are two of very few hot dog vendors in the city. Despite this, and the fact that their city permits allow them a fair amount of latitude, the dueling entrepreneurs often seem to covet the same spot - a patch of shoulder just west of Mocha Lane, on the south side of Hopper.

“It’s actually kind of hilarious,” said builder Ian Keller. “There’s a taco truck on every other block, but apparently there isn’t room for two hot dog vendors in Coffey Park.”

None of the condiments they provide customers, primarily the hungry laborers and contractors rebuilding the neighborhood, are as spicy as this food fight, which simmered for several months before reaching full boil this week.

Heskett started a price war Tuesday, dropping his fee for a wiener, soda and chips from $6 to $4 to $3 to $2. And he wasn’t finished. Gritting his teeth, Bryan matched those prices, occasionally using a battery-powered bullhorn to disparage his competitor and the quality of his hot dogs.

Which was silly, said Heskett, considering they both buy their Polish sausages and beef franks from the same Cash & Carry.

When Bryan assured passersby he would match any price, Heskett dropped his dogs to 1 cent, then started giving them away to construction workers, posting a sign that said “Free Hot Dogs: Thanks For Rebuilding My House.”

“He was pulling heartstrings,” Bryan said, with grudging admiration.

Neither vendor seemed inclined to budge, nor did they seem to realize how much they have in common. Both lost their homes in the Tubbs fire. And both have lost loved ones in recent years.

Three days after the blaze that burned the Mark West house he was renting, Bryan was laid off by his employer, Safari West. Homeless, unemployed and broke, he moved into a FEMA trailer at the Sonoma County Fairgrounds.

“It is what it is. I’ve been through worse,” said the man who’s buried two of his children.

His daughter Tory, who suffered from brittle bone disease, died when she was 25, after suffering 600 fractures in her life.

His son, Cole, was attending CSU Chico when he was struck and killed by a train in 2003.

Bryan says he suffered a heart attack in January.

“While I was dealing with that, they took some cancer out of my back,” he said. “I have a reverse bucket list going. All the worst stuff you don’t want to happen in your life.”

A general contractor for ?37 years, Bryan was tempted to renew his license to pitch in with the fire rebuilding efforts in Coffey Park. But he worried about the 60-hour weeks. “This body’s too beat up,” he said.

So he dropped close to $10,000 on a hot dog cart. It took nine months, but he finally got his permits from the city and county in early January. He’d been hawking hot dogs for three months, happy to average $250 to $300 a day, when a customer told him he had some competition.

After cruising past and eyeballing the new guy, Bryan noticed that Heskett’s cart lacked a green sticker from the county health department. He warned the lad that, without it, the county health officials would shut him down.

And so they did, a couple days later.

“He called the health department on me,” Heskett said. Bryan denied that saying, “I don’t rat, that’s not me.”

While he didn’t technically have his permit at the time, Heskett said, “my cart was completely up to code. I just had to schedule my inspection.”

Having worked so hard, his dream so close to becoming reality, he couldn’t help but take it out for a test drive.

Heskett’s mother died of cancer when he was in fifth grade. He was a freshman at Maria Carillo High School when his family home on Crestview Drive in Coffey Park burned in the wildfire.

Those events “definitely made me grow up faster,” he said. “You learn that nothing in life is easy. You just have to take on the world.”

The losses instilled in him a strong desire to “have control over my life,” the 16-year-old said. To do that, he vowed he would work for himself. “Seventh grade was when I decided I wanted to get a hot dog cart.”

Following the fire, his family moved to Windsor. Missing his friends, Heskett focused on earning money. Between busing tables and distributing flyers for a blinds company, he saved $7,000 in a year, enough to buy a used hot dog cart.

Finally, in mid-June three months after his brush with the health department, Heskett passed his county health inspection and got that precious green sticker. Back in business, he had two strong days parked at the same spot on Hopper. When he returned the third day, Bryan had taken it.

“To me, it was clear he was saying, ‘This is my territory, you can’t be here,’” Heskett said.

Unsure of what to do, Heskett went home. The next time out, however, Heskett parked directly across the street from Bryan, who asked incredulously, “Dude, what are you doing?’ And he said, ‘I have a right to be here.’

“But if you stay here, we’re both gonna make half of what we could make.”

Heskett dug in. He wasn’t going anywhere.

Bryan proposed a compromise. They would flip a coin. The winner would stay in the primo spot, the loser would go elsewhere, then flip-flop the rest of the week.

Thanks but no thanks, Heskett said. “If I tell my customers where I’m going to set up, that’s where I’m going to set up.”

By Friday, a fragile truce had taken hold. The rivals were set up across the street from one another on Hopper Avenue, and their price war had ended. In a small victory for Bryan, Heskett had to cut out about noon to go bus tables.

How does this resolve? While it may not come soon, Heskett foresees a day when he will outgrow Coffey Park.

“I want to go all around the city, to find better locations,” said the teenager, who aspires to run his own catering company. “I want to do bigger things than just hot dogs.”

You can reach Staff Writer Austin Murphy at 707-521-5214 or austin.murphy@pressdemocrat.com.