What Happened to Ann Arbor’s Most Famous Hot Dog Stand?

Ann Arbor — East Liberty street bustles with activity and commerce. New stores and restaurants, new high-rise apartments going up in the neighborhood constantly. Even Pinball Pete’s is moving over there from its old South University Avenue location.

Amid all this activity sits a curious, dilapidated red building covered in graffiti. What was this building in its prime, and why does it now sit vacant around so much prime real estate?

This roadside stand used to be known as Le Dog, until it shut down this location in 2014. It was Ann Arbor’s most famous hot dog stand, known more for its crazy variety of soups than its hot dogs.

Hungarian immigrant Jules Van Dyck-Dobos started it up in 1979. He served just hot dogs and lemonade before expanding into 428 rotating varieties of soup. Eventually, Le Dog opened a second location in the old Kline’s Department Store building on Main Street.

Le Dog was a family operation run by Jules and his wife and son. Open for only a few hours during lunch time and taking cash only, it was part of the heyday of quirky Ann Arbor food establishments—think the original Blimpy Burger or Fleetwood Diner.

In my college days, Le Dog was a popular place to grab a quick bowl of soup. Ann Arbor locals, more than out of state students, frequented the place. The few U-M students who grew up in Ann Arbor, usually hippie types, gushed about it with reverence.

That section of East Liberty was hipster mecca. Le Dog was situated down the street, across an intersection away from the American Apparel store. Ragstock is still over there, though they sell fewer skinny jeans these days.

Now it sits empty, decaying, covered in sprawling angry graffiti and communist leaflets. What happened to this beloved hot dog stand?

By all accounts, when Jules retired in 2014, Le Dog made the difficult decision to close the East Liberty location. The landlord was uncooperative, the place needed work, and it was too cumbersome running two locations.

Le Dog consolidated operations at the Main Street location, before Jules sold the business to a few former employees two years ago.

It now operates as Le Dog = La Soup, a rebrand that centers their focus on soup, without dropping the original name that they’ve been known by for decades.

Venezuelan arepas are the newest addition to the menu in the summer months, and business seems to be booming. Reviews averaging 4.9 stars on Google is no joke.

It’s a shame, however, that the modernist red castle now sits vacant in such a state of disrepair. Le Dog in the old days was an iconic part of Ann Arbor, something that came from the days before all the high rises, when Ann Arbor was broker, quirkier, and more unique.

The property itself is in a state of limbo. According to public records, a holding company placed a claim on it last year at a tax sale. A representative from the company informed me that the previous owners died, and the property passed to their children, but due to unpaid property taxes it was put up for public auction.

Michigan property laws give the inheritors until August, however, to pay the back taxes and redeem the property themselves. Given the high value of the property, the holding company believes they almost certainly will. Until then, at the earliest, the property will remain vacant as it currently stands.

It’s a microcosm of Ann Arbor’s current situation. An icon of older days, left stagnant, either to be eventually torn down or remodeled.

On the one hand, it’s important for Ann Arbor to be open to new development, to accept new changes to the cityscape, even if the character of the city shifts in certain ways, which is inevitable with expansion.

On the other hand, the city needs to maintain its unique energy. The challenge is to maintain the old, quirky vibes from Ann Arbor’s grimier days in the 1960s and ‘70s, while not letting them decay or fester as eyesores.

Ann Arbor needs the high rises, but it needs quirky little modernist castle-esque hot dog stands too. It needs the weird little joints that make the city iconic. Otherwise, it truly will just become an overgrown outdoor shopping mall.

This old hot dog stand deserves to be remembered, but more so it deserves a new life, a new purpose and function to bring it back into the strange little community for passersby.

That’s how Ann Arbor can keep on building, without losing its soul.