Nicholas Gray, the founder of Gray’s Papaya, a hot dog stand in a window display whose culinary eccentricity, competitive pricing, clever slogans and apparent immutability earned the affection of New Yorkers young and old, rich and poor, died Friday in a Manhattan hospital. He turned 86.
The cause was complications from Alzheimer’s disease, his daughter Natasha Gray said.
Pastrami on rye and bagels and lox, to name two canonical combinations of New York cuisine, possess a kind of obvious logic. In contrast, papaya juice and hot dogs, the specialty of Gray’s Papaya, seem to be favorites of separate – perhaps opposing – socio-cultural groups.
Still, this odd couple of Original Ray’s Pizza-esque gained ascendancy in local restaurants. In addition to Gray’s Papaya on Manhattan’s Upper West Side and Papaya King on the Upper East Side – the main suppliers – New York establishments selling hot dogs and papaya juice include 14th Street Papaya, Chelsea Papaya, Empire Papaya, Papaya International, Papaya World, Papaya World II, Papaya Heaven and Papaya Paradise.
According to most accounts, the pair’s origins date back to the 1930s, when Constantine Poulos, a New York deli owner who loved tropical vacations, began selling the juice of exotic-looking fruits. (Some have described the venture as New York’s first juice bar.) In later years, he added hot dogs to the menu and crowned his Papaya King at his Upper East Side store.
The papaya-frankfurter combination was not yet a big local phenomenon when one day in 1973 Mr. Gray, a recently divorced Wall Street stockbroker dissatisfied with his job, walked past Papaya King on East 86th Street and Third Avenue.
It was busy with happy people. The tropical sap reminded him of his homeland, Chile. The bright neon sign and hot dogs spoke of his penchant for Americana.
He resigned and entered into a franchise agreement with Papaya King to open a location at 72nd Street and Broadway on the Upper West Side. After two years, he went independent and named his restaurant Gray’s Papaya.
Soon his turn was itself turned off.
The variants tend to share essential traits. Like Italy’s espresso bars, papaya joints have no seating; you chew standing up. In the milder months, the doors are perpetually open to the breeze and sound of honking cars, as if the eateries were an extension of the sidewalk. The hot dogs are prepared on griddles, not in the so-called dirty water of hot dog carts. And the papaya drinks, often characterized as chalky, taste not so much of papaya as a soft echo of it.
If Papaya King had the Yankees’ tradition and brand recognition, Gray’s Papaya was the Mets, a scruffy expansion team. It became a destination for an after-school snack, a quick bite before a Lincoln Center show, an on-the-go meal during the workday, and a treat after a romp in Central Park.
The store announced the opening with good news for the hot dog hoi polloi: 50 cent hot dogs, compared to Papaya King’s 75. (The price remained 50 cents until 1999). In 1982, Mr. Gray began offering what he called the Recession Special: two dogs and a tropical juice for $1.95. That bargain, which weathered several recessions, is now going for $6.45.
He hated price increases. “It’s always very traumatic for me and also for the customers,” he told The New York Times in 2008. He once put up a sign that read, “We are being killed by a galloping inflation of food costs. Unlike politicians, we are not raising our debt ceiling and we are forced to raise our very reasonable prices, please don’t hate us.”
That sign and many others gave the restaurant a fanciful but penetrating tone. Upon opening, Mr. Gray held up a sign he made himself proclaiming a “Hot Dog Revolution!” The shop window promises “No one but no one serves a better frankfurter” and “No gimmicks! No bull!” An inside sign identifies papaya as “the aristocratic melon of the tropics.”
Signs reflected Mr. Gray’s political views. “Hold on, Mr. President,” one urged Bill Clinton as he faced impeachment in 1998. In 2007, Mr. Gray promised “free hot dogs on Inauguration Day” if Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg ran for president the following year and won. Mr. Gray’s public views, cocky though they may be, have always been positive. Gray’s Papaya sold buttons that read “Polite New Yorker.”
Decades after its founding, Gray’s Papaya had become a New York institution.
“Rental stabilization was an indelible part of New York life, just like Gray’s Papaya,” Nora Ephron wrote in The New Yorker in 2006. “It would never be tampered with.”
Nicholas Alexander Buchanan Gray Anguita was born on January 17, 1937 in Valparaiso, Chile. His father, Alexander, was a British bank manager sent abroad by his employer. His mother, Nieves (Anguita) Gray, a native Chilean, was a housewife.
Nick attended Sherborne School in the South West of England and after graduating washed the dishes at a radar station in the Arctic Circle to earn money for college.
While studying at McGill University in Montreal, he met Patricia Osterman, a student at Syracuse University. The two dropped out of college, married, and raised a family on the Upper West Side.
Patricia’s father, Lester Osterman, was a Broadway producer and Mr. Gray helped manage his productions before working on Wall Street. By 1975, Mr. Gray and his wife were divorced.
He also ran a Gray’s Papaya branch in Greenwich Village from 1987 to 2014 and opened two locations on Eighth Avenue in Midtown, the last of which closed in 2021.
Rising commercial rents destroyed many of the papaya establishments. In addition to the original Gray’s location and a recently relocated Papaya King, soon to open across Third Avenue, New York will retain Papaya Dog on West Fourth Street, Chelsea Papaya on West 23rd, and Len’s Papaya in the Whitehall Ferry Terminal in the Financial District .
In 1989, a frat brother of Mr. Gray from McGill told his daughter, Rachael Eberts, an incoming architecture student at Parsons School of Design, to look up Mr. Gray when she arrived in New York. They got married in 1996.
In addition to his daughter Natasha, Mr. Gray is survived by his wife; another daughter from his first marriage, Sheila Gray; a daughter and son from his second marriage, Tessa and Rufus Gray; a sister, Robina Pereira; and a granddaughter.
Mr Gray lived most of his life on the block opposite Gray’s Papaya and more recently in the clothing district.
Rachael Gray helped run Gray’s Papaya and took over as her husband’s Alzheimer’s disease progressed. Tessa and Rufus, 18-year-old twins, sometimes work behind the counter, especially in the summer.
As for the future, “Long live Gray’s Papaya,” said Mrs. Gray in a telephone interview. The shop has a friendly relationship with its old landlords and the lease is still on for years, which the family plans to renew.
