Shelling out six figures for a piece of Manhattan real estate should get you a roof and four walls, but not if you’re a hot dog vendor vying for prime selling space in and around Central Park.

On Tuesday, vendors offered to pay the city hundreds of thousands of dollars to rent just a few feet of sidewalk space — the same amount some people pay for an entire apartment — for their pushcarts.

Minimum bids for the 10 new pushcart contracts up for grabs range from a low of $7,350 a year for the Central Park side of Fifth Avenue between East 97th and East 98th streets, to an eye-popping $176,925 for the right to hawk snacks and sodas at the northwest corner of East 60th Street and Fifth Avenue.

– Leslie Albrecht, DNAInfo.com.

The article goes on to detail how tough it is to make it as a street vendor these days, in large part due to the overwhelming cost of overhead. The moral of the story is: Tip your hot-dog man.

I love living in (or, technically, near) a city where hot dogs, halal meats, roasted nuts, and various curbside sundries are so abundantly available. While in college once while I was down by the putrid C&O Canal near Georgetown, someone (not a New Yorker) joked that I probably had a higher tolerance for bad smells since I had spent so much time in New York City. But New York City, for the most part, smells amazing. Sure there’s exhaust and the occasional randomly steaming sewer of gross stuff, plus there are spots outside fish markets that are pretty awful, but generally it smells like meat and pizza and all sorts of delicious things.