Heid’s of Liverpool at 109: How a Hot Dog Stand Outlasted Almost Everything

By Jen Okafor, Staff Reporter

The neon out front has been pointing at the order window since 1949, when Val Heid came back from a World’s Fair with the design in his head. The Hofmann frank in the bun behind that window goes back to 1917. People are still pulling off the Onondaga Lake Parkway to stand on the asphalt and wait for one, the same way the parents and grandparents of the regulars did during the Great Depression, two world wars, four ownership transitions, and a global pandemic.

Heid’s of Liverpool is 109 years old in 2026. It is the kind of Central New York landmark that does not need a marketing campaign to find a customer; the current generation of regulars are themselves the grandchildren of the people who first stood at that window in the 1920s. On November 21, 2025, a group of homeschooled middle and high schoolers in Liverpool unveiled a Pomeroy historic marker on the property, attaching a polished aluminum certificate to a place locals had treated as historic for as long as anyone could remember.

1886 and the meat man from Germany

The story does not start with a hot dog. It starts with a butcher. Michael Heid arrived in Liverpool from Germany in the 1880s, and in 1886 he opened a meat market on the corner of Vine and Oswego Streets. According to the Liverpool village historian’s office, an early fire after sparks jumped from the railroad tracks burned the place down. Heid rebuilt two years later. He added a grocery counter and a general store. He kept butchering. He had sons.

One of those sons, Valentine A. Heid, known to everyone as Val, was a delivery driver in the early 1900s. The family later said Val started selling hot dogs from a cart around 1917, while World War I was still on. The cart became a shed. The shed became a stand. By around 1930, with the new Onondaga Lake Parkway running fresh asphalt past his door, Val moved the operation to the corner of the parkway and Oswego Street. The hot dog cart had become a restaurant.

The Heids made themselves into a Liverpool institution well beyond the menu. According to the Liverpool village historian’s office, a Heid served as mayor of the village in the postwar era; the village named Heid Park in the family’s honor. The Heids helped young employees pay tuition. Val died in 1959. His widow Bertha kept the place open until her own death in 1977. The next generation took over, and the next.

The Hofmann partnership

Heid’s never made its own franks. From day one in 1917 the stand has used Hofmann sausages, made on Stewart Drive in Syracuse by a German immigrant family of butchers who had themselves arrived a generation earlier. Frank W. Hofmann came to New York in 1861 carrying his family’s German recipes. His company was incorporated in Syracuse in 1879. Today Hofmann is the dominant name on every meat case in Central New York, and its German Brand Frankfurter, with that famous snappy natural casing, is the same thing it has been for 145 years.

In 1934 Hofmann introduced a second product, the Snappy Griller, modeled on a traditional white German veal-and-pork sausage. Locals call them coneys. Heid’s grills them next to the franks. A “mixed double” off the Heid’s menu, an order that has been on the wall for as long as anyone living can remember, is one of each tucked into a single grilled New England-style roll.

The Hofmann partnership has not been frictionless. Roadfood and the Daily Orange both note that there was a falling out between Heid’s and Hofmann in 1993, and for about four years Heid’s stopped serving Hofmann brand product altogether. The two reconciled in the late 1990s, and Heid’s has been pouring Hofmann franks onto the grill ever since. In April 2024 Hofmann itself was sold by the Oneida Indian Nation, which had owned the company, to Miami Beef Co. of Florida. Miami Beef’s leadership said publicly that the company planned to continue operating Hofmann’s Syracuse facilities and grow the brand’s reach. From the customer side of the order window, nothing changed.

1949: when the neon arrived

The piece of Heid’s that ends up in everyone’s photographs is the sign. Val Heid traveled to a 1949 World’s Fair, saw the future of postwar commercial design, and brought home an art deco facade and the orange-and-white neon arrow that has been pointing at the order window for 76 years. The bowling alley that he had attached to the building in 1934, a four-lane operation that ran for two decades, was converted in 1954 into the ice-cream parlor next door, Heid’s Sweet Treats, which still serves Byrne Dairy soft serve out the window in summer.

The neon is more than decorative. The Pomeroy Foundation marker installed in November 2025 calls the building a “Syracuse area landmark,” and the plaque was the result of a year-long research project run out of the Liverpool Public Library by librarian Jeanie Godly. Teen and tween homeschoolers studied the family records, wrote the application, and chose the wording that now sits in front of the stand on the parkway side. Two other markers went up the same morning at other Liverpool sites. Heid’s was the only restaurant.

Ownership, and the family that keeps it going

The Heid family ran the place directly until 1995, when brothers John and Randy Parker bought the restaurant. The Parkers were not strangers to it. John Parker had eaten at Heid’s all his life and kept the menu close to where it was, with one controversial addition: he allowed ketchup at the counter, a bottle that for nearly 75 years had been refused on principle. Roadfood pegs the ketchup arrival to November 1991, although other accounts attribute the formal change to the Parker era.

John Parker died of cancer at 60 on October 26, 2013. Eagle News Online ran the obituary and the village mourned. The restaurant closed for one night, October 30, 2013, while the staff attended the wake. It opened the next morning. Parker’s wife Sandra continued the business with the family. His five children, Vicki, Lynne, Daniel, Mark and Beth, are all on record in the obituary. The family has kept Heid’s open under the same name and the same recipes since.

The pandemic, and what almost broke it

The closest Heid’s came to disappearing in this century was the spring of 2020. The state’s first emergency order in March 2020 forced indoor service to close. Heid’s pivoted to takeout and curbside, and several long-tenured employees in their fifties and sixties stepped away rather than work the window through a respiratory pandemic. Manager Jessica Lamariana told the Newhouse NCC News in October 2021 that supply chain shortages meant they were “constantly ordering things and we’d be out” for weeks at a stretch. At one point the stand could not assemble the five employees needed to staff a single shift.

What saved the place, grill master Xavier Sanchez told Newhouse, was the curbside lane. “When that kind of came in we really started booming.” By the fall of 2021 Heid’s was back open across the dining room, the lawn benches, and the curbside lane all at once. The flood of takeout orders had taught them a new operational discipline. Sanchez told the reporter, in a quote that anyone in the Syracuse food business should keep on a wall: “I feel as though it will remain a staple in the community for another 500 years.”

The menu in 2026, with prices

Heid’s still operates seven days a week, year-round, from 10 a.m. to 9 p.m. The menu hews to the original. A Hofmann frank or a Hofmann coney is the centerpiece. There are Philly cheese steaks, a Gianelli sausage, grilled cheese, chicken tenders. The sides are french fries, onion rings, fried pickles, mozzarella sticks. There is mac and cheese with elbow noodles. The chocolate milk in the cooler is Byrne Dairy.

The Daily Orange’s 2019 menu run included these prices, useful as a baseline against today’s board: french fries $2.55, onion rings $4.95, mac and cheese $3.75, the mixed double $6.25, a Philly cheese steak $6.75, a 12-ounce Byrne Dairy chocolate milk $2.70. Even with inflation since, ordering a hot dog and a side at Heid’s is still cheaper than ordering a hot dog and a side at most ballpark concessions in the Northeast.

The volume is what tells you the place is alive. Heid’s says on its own site that it serves about 250,000 Hofmann franks and coneys a year. That is roughly 685 hot dogs a day, every day, every season. Summer evenings the line wraps around the building.

Why it has lasted

Most American hot dog stands of Heid’s vintage are gone. The Roadside Architecture community keeps lists of the surviving examples, and a 1917 stand that still serves the same brand of frankfurter from the same address with a 1949 neon sign on the same facade is not a category that has many members. The reasons Heid’s is one of them are not mysterious. The Heid family treated the place as a public trust, not a real estate asset. The Parker family did the same. The Hofmann partnership has been intact for 109 of those years, with one four-year interruption that the customers forgave once it was over. The neon has been maintained. The menu has been mostly left alone. The community came back after the pandemic.

And it is the kind of place that gets a Pomeroy marker not from a planning commission, but from a teenaged homeschooler who decided it mattered.

On a warm evening in late April the lights came on, the line ran from the order window past the picnic tables out toward the parking lot, and the man at the front had three kids in tow. He was 41 years old, ordering from a menu he had been working through since he was seven. Behind him was a couple in their twenties on a third date. Behind them was a teenager from Cicero who had never been to Heid’s, did not know what a coney was, and asked the woman in front of her what she was supposed to order. She got the answer everyone in Central New York eventually gets.

“Get the mixed double.”

What we found in further reporting

The on-record voices closest to the November 2025 Pomeroy Foundation marker installation at Heid’s are documented in the Eagle News Online coverage of the morning the markers went up. Liverpool Public Library Director Susan Reckhow framed why the library backed a year-long student research project into Heid’s, the Mud Lock and the Willow Shop in plain terms. “Preservation of local history is important,” Reckhow said in a November 21, 2025 interview with Eagle News. “It helps us to understand the present, and chart a course for the future.” Reckhow also explained how the library landed the Pomeroy grant: “We connected with the organization and thought this would be a great opportunity for our homeschool students.”

One of the homeschoolers on the project, Austin Wilmot, told Eagle News what the Heid’s research changed for him. “I had never heard about writing historical markers,” Wilmot said. “I previously thought that some company just wrote about some fun places for profit or something, but this program truly opened my eyes to what it’s all about.” Wilmot added: “People may walk by the signs and realize there is history there and that it’s more important than it seems to be. I hope one day a kid or a teen will walk by the marker and think about all the history around town that they can research and write about as well.”

Five additional verified facts not previously reflected:

• The Pomeroy Foundation marker for Heid’s was the only restaurant honored among three Liverpool sites unveiled November 21, 2025. The other two were the Mud Lock and the Willow Shop, marking the village’s nineteenth-century willow basket-weaving industry. Pomeroy historian Zachary Finn personally guided the homeschoolers in primary-source research methodology over the course of the year.
• The official Pomeroy Foundation citation for the Heid’s marker, on file at wgpfoundation.org, identifies the property as a “Syracuse area landmark” tied directly to Valentine A. Heid, a Liverpool native who launched the family hot dog stand around 1917.
• The student researchers were supported by Liverpool Public Library librarian Laurel Griffiths and historians Joan Cregg, Derek Pratt and Suzanne Spellen, in addition to homeschool liaison Jeanie Godly. The project was published as a research package the library now uses in school programming.
• The Hofmann Sausage Company, which has supplied Heid’s with its German-Brand Frankfurters since 1917, was sold by the Oneida Indian Nation to Miami Beef of Florida, with the deal announced April 18, 2024. Miami Beef’s CEO publicly committed to continued investment in the Syracuse facilities and to growing Hofmann’s national footprint. The deal was advised by Mentor Securities.
• The Liverpool Historian’s Office account, written by Village Historian Joan Cregg and volunteer Heather Moses for Eagle News, documents the Heid family’s civic role in Liverpool, including a member of the family serving as the village’s postwar mayor (1949 to 1951). Heid Park is named in the family’s honor.

Sources and verification. William G. Pomeroy Foundation historic marker citation for Heid’s, November 2025. Liverpool Historian’s Office account in Eagle News Online (“Heid’s: A Liverpool landmark”). Eagle News Online obituary for John Parker, November 5, 2013. Daily Orange feature, March 2016. Newhouse NCC News pandemic feature, October 2021. Hofmann Sausage Company corporate history, hofmannsausage.com. Miami Beef acquisition release via Mentor Securities/Yahoo Finance, Aprilruary 2024. heidsofliverpool.com. Roadfood entry. Photos by DanielPenfield via Wikimedia Commons, licensed CC BY-SA 4.0.