Hello. Coming to this a little bit late. Sorry about that. The short answer is "yes, very much, in some cities."

I am not an expert across the whole country, but there are two areas where I can comment with some expertise: New York and New Orleans. And it is not an accident that I am picking cities, either.

The reason is this: fast food generally presupposes cars. Barring cars, it definitely requires a lot of people in not a lot of space, because the sellers require volume to make up for smaller margins. And generally, as I've written elsewhere (happy to link if you'd like) if you go back in time, (a) people had less disposable income; (b) food took up a greater share of their disposable income; and (c) restaurants as such were less significant, and cooking at home more significant, compared to today.

New York is a great place to start. Mark Kurlansky's excellent book, The Big Oyster, goes into this in elaborate detail, and he explains that oysters were a mainstay of New York (700 million oysters per year by the 1880s) and those were eaten, well, everywhere - including basically on-the-go. This is one of the first instances of street food proper.

The po boy is another instance, and it, by reputation, dates to 1929, when the Amalgamated Association of Electric Street Railway Employees (think: streetcar employees) went on strike, and the Martin brothers, two former streetcar workers themselves, fed them bread with potatoes and gravy. It caught on, and other places - Parkway and Domelise's still exist - started selling the same.

In 1929, the "poor boy" was created by the Martin brothers, who came up with the simple but hearty sandwich when the Amalgamated Association of Electric Street Railway Employees, Division 194, went on strike, sending over a thousand unionized streetcar drivers and motormen off the job and onto the picket line. The Martin brothers gave away sandwiches to the strikers that usually consisted of fried potatoes, gravy, and spare bits of roast beef on French bread.

Though a little further from my expertise, as I understand it, the Chicago hot dog also started in 1929 at a place called Flunky's, for five cents - originally called a "Depression Sandwich."

So in sum, we have some common threads that shouldn't surprise you: a bunch of people who need food in a tight space, and cheap ingredients. That's mostly what fast food is all about, right?

An important note about the above: I am highlighting three particular instances of street food but I'm not meaning to suggest that they are exclusive, or that they're the first: there were a significant number of street vendors in big cities predating the 1880s. By way of small 'for instance' California had street-sold tamales going back to the 19th Century.

Selected bibliography:

Andrew Coe and Jane Ziegelman: A Square Meal: A Culinary History of the Great Depression

Mark Kurlansky: The Big Oyster

Errol Laborde: I Never Danced with an Eggplant (on a Streetcar Before): Chronicles of life and adventure in New Orleans

Farley Elliott: Los Angeles Street Food:: A History from Tamaleros to Taco Trucks

Edited to fix an incomplete sentence.