I also insisted we spin by the Broadway Market immediately after detraining in Buffalo, thinking it would be fairly lively, what with Easter coming and the butter lambs getting fat. But jeebus, it was sad. Usually around food holidays this last vestige of Polish dominance downtown is a bustling center of Old World exuberance and edibles. Apparently we were a couple of weeks early, though, because we couldn’t even find a chocolate Jesus (only a $2 Last Supper, sold by earnest men from one of the dying cathedrals nearby). Otherwise, it was gimmicks and grimness. Except, surprisingly, for the butcher counters on the back side, two of which were two and three deep with customers packed in to load up on smoked turkey and pork parts and a cornucopia of sausages and honking huge slabs of beef. The third counter, the one with lots o’ little-and-big butter lambs, was deserted, with two young countermen basically twiddling their unbloody thumbs. And Bob put his finger on why: Their half-empty case was stocked with what the long-gone would buy — the ovine butter, un-housemade sausages, pork, chicken etc. — while the competition was stocked not just for Poles coming in for old time’s sake but for the people who actually live around there. On the way back to the car in the free garage, we looked out from on high to try to figure out where the Polish restaurant we once ate in might have been, 20-some years ago. And we talked about how downtown is increasingly becoming urban farms rather than inner-city blight. If ever a covered market was in the right place at the right time. . .