Fred Hakim’s family owned a hole-in-the-wall hot-dog counter in Times Square that was the last of its kind when New York decided to revitalize the area in the 1990s by condemning dozens of establishments like his. It was a seven-seat, 250-square-foot piece of Edward Hopper streetscape at 229-31 W. 42nd St., which Mr. Hakim’s father had opened in 1941 and wryly named the Grand Luncheonette.

Mr. Hakim tried to keep the place open as a sort of living museum of the golden age of hawkers and honky-tonks in Times Square. But the city had other ideas, and after a two-year fight, he was evicted on Oct. 19, 1997.

He died April 25 at age 83.

Mr. Hakim seemed stumped by the economics of the Times Square redevelopment. In conversations with family members, and in interviews with the many reporters who crowded his joint in its last days, he often asked, “Where are the people who just want a hot dog and a knish?’’

Working for his father from age 13, Mr. Hakim was witness to a New Yorker’s version of the history of the world. From the counter, he saw bobby-soxers rounding the corner to swoon over Frank Sinatra at the Paramount. He watched the crowds flood the street like a dam burst on V-E Day, May 8, 1945, which also marked the end of the wartime brownout, when the lights in Times Square - the billboards, the marquees, the windows in every building that had been dark for three years - blazed once again.

He met a world of shoeshine men, longshoremen, sailors, drug dealers, prostitutes, and policemen in the gritty years. “He called it a symbiotic relationship,’’ his son Mark said. “You depended on each other, and no one was in anybody’s business.’’