By Charlotte Hsu – Buffalo, N.Y. — The hatmaker who has dressed James Garner and Leonardo DiCaprio keeps shop on Broadway Street, steps from the Family Dollar store.
Few other businesses are open on this East Side drag, a commercial district that hummed with foot traffic in decades past. Several doors down, vintage, red-and-yellow lettering announces the Club Romway tavern, but the establishment closed years ago and the three-floor building that housed it is boarded up. Plastic bottles and fast food wrappers slick with grease and cheese litter sidewalks. Vandals, time and weather have reduced homes in the area to rotting shells, their empty innards exposed to wind, rain and snow that rush in through gaping holes where glass used to be.
I’ve known Gary for years. His business is truly a gem.