(By Donn Esmonde – Buffalo News) Sometimes you have to put your money where your heart is. That is what Eddy Dobosiewicz figured out. Good intentions do not go far in a neighborhood this far gone.
That is how Dobosiewicz—aka Airborne Eddy, aka Maxwell Truth—came to own the old Strusienski Restaurant. It was his for a bargain-basement $2,000 at last fall’s city auction. He thought that it was a small price to pay for a neighbor-hood icon, three floors of boarded-up nostalgia and potential in the shadow of the Central Terminal.
Some neighborhoods are more of a state of mind than a street grid. Few capture the imagination of true believers like the blocks surrounding the Broadway Market. Once a working-class Polish- American enclave, the neighborhood stands as a worst-case scenario, a battered, crime-plagued victim of suburban flight and middle-income abandonment.