After more than three months of being closed, Parky’s is finally set to reopen its doors next week.
“I want to be open by Wednesday, but Friday guaranteed,” said Sonya Flores, who co-owns Parky’s with her father. She said she is hoping to reopen by Feb. 9.
On Oct. 27 around 9:30 p.m., a driver crashed into Parky’s Hot Dogs on Harlem Avenue after the restaurant had closed for the day. The car destroyed Parky’s patio, which impacted an interior wall and the kitchen of the beloved local spot.
Flores said that working with Parky’s insurance company caused the delay in reopening the hot dog eatery.
“We’ve just been jumping through hoops and waiting,” Flores said about dealing with Parky’s insurance. “Every time they say something, the deadline gets moved.”
After construction is completed on an interior wall, Parky’s will wait for approval to start construction on the patio.
“Unfortunately, they’re not going to be able to restore our outside the way it was with wood,” Flores said. The patio will look similar to its state before the car crash, this time with a canopy constructed out of aluminum.
Although Parky’s reopening is on the horizon, the car crashed into the restaurant during a busy season for many businesses.
“It happened at a really horrible time,” Flores said of the late-October crash. “You had the holidays right after that.” She adds, “We’ve been hurting.”
The damage cost Flores an estimated hundreds of thousands of dollars in sales and around $90,000 in out-of-pocket construction costs.
Parky’s is among the oldest eateries still open in Forest Park, well-known as one of the few Chicagoland hot dog spots that doesn’t use Vienna beef, instead making sausages in-house. Parky’s original location opened in 1946 on Roosevelt Road in Berwyn, and its current location on S. Harlem Avenue followed a year later.
Parky’s has been in Flores’ family since her mother, who started working there in the ‘80s, bought the restaurant from its founder, Eugene Arist, in 1995. In 2008, Flores bought out her mother, who died in 2021.
“I want to make sure that this place still stands for her memory because she honestly loved this place,” Flores said. “We’ve been missing it.”
If there was a silver lining in Parky’s temporary closure, it would be that Flores hadn’t had a vacation since she started working at the hot dog spot in 1996.
“This has been the most time off I’ve had in my entire career,” Flores said. “I’ve learned that I can cook.”
Although insurance delays have been frustrating for Flores, she said that Forest Park has been instrumental in getting Parky’s back on its feet.
“I love the Forest Park building department. They’ve helped us through a lot,” Flores said. “It really feels like family with them,” she added, with their customers too. “I’m hoping that the community that pulled us through the pandemic will pull us through this because, honestly, without them, we ain’t s—.”