The case for a slower burger, and the
park bench that made it possible.
Twenty years after a hot-dog cart appeared between two oak trees at the north end of Madison Square Park, the lessons of waiting in line are still the ones nobody copies.
It snowed the morning the cart opened in 2004, and the woman who would later become the manager later told me the first hour was three hot dogs and a cup of coffee with too much sugar. By spring the line had folded itself twice around the iron fence and the rules of the place — pay in cash, wait your turn, eat on a bench — had already become the kind of customs people argued about on the internet without ever quite being able to fix.
A park bench is not a focus group.
I spent two weeks last winter rewriting an article I'd written four years ago about the same subject, and the thing I kept underlining was this: the menu in 2004 had four items. The signage was painted by hand by a stagehand from the Public Theater. The chartreuse-green that everyone now reads as a brand color was, originally, just the green of the park benches once they'd faded for a season — a color the designers found by walking through the grass at dusk and matching paint chips against the wood.