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.

But there are signs of life among the empty lots and boarded-up buildings, nuggets in a tapped-out vein—if you have the eyes to see. Then you see the holdover shot-and- beer bars with tin ceilings. You see century-old churches that could pass for palaces. You see bustling street life along Broadway-Fillmore. Looming over it all in its battered glory is the irrepressible reminder of time gone by—the Central Terminal.

This is the beauty and character that attracts believers such as Dobosiewicz. Like a lot of the faithful, he grew up on these streets. As a kid, he placed pennies on the Central Terminal tracks to be flattened by incoming trains. Some of his friends stayed. Most, like him, left for parts distant.

He reinvented himself in L. A. as a stand-up comic, then moved to North Buffalo in the ’80s and opened comedy clubs. But the old ’hood haunted him like a first love, beckoning him back. He was seduced by the romance of possibility, by the appeal of tattered grandeur. The streets are like the prom queen you find down on her luck decades later, faded but not beyond redemption.

As we strolled along Lombard Street on a recent afternoon, Eddy pointed to vacant but serviceable structures.

“Most people see blight and poverty,” he said. “I see history and future. It’s a funky, affordable urban environment.”

Eddy is a local celebrity, a follicle-challenged fireplug with a fully charged battery. Under the pseudonym Maxwell Truth, he co-stars in “Off-Beat Cinema,” the late-night, faux-beatnik ode to awful movies. His Forgotten Buffalo bus tours reveal the gems hidden in fallow landscapes. He is one of dozens of come-backers or never-lefts who believe in the neighborhood’s salvation. You see them cleaning up the gutted terminal or partying on Dyngus Day or buying and fixing houses or sucking down Zywiecs in the Three Deuces.

It is something between a murmur and a movement. And now, by buying the Strusienski Restaurant, Dobosiewicz has truly signed on.

“I got tired of seeing the bulldozers,” he said. “I had to jump in. . . . You can fix these places up for less than it costs the city to knock them down.”

The noble battle may be a lost cause. On some streets, vacant lots and boarded- up buildings outnumber lived-in houses. But there is a heaving of energy and a smattering of investment. Muslim immigrants are settling on nearby streets.

The Strusienski has a copper ceiling, an oak-topped bar, an upstairs apartment and a full-size attic. Like many places on these streets, it is a lot of building for a little money. Eddy wants to fix it and find somebody to reboot the bar and restaurant. He imagines a hybrid of neighborhood joint and hipster hangout.

“If we can get something going on Paderewski Drive,” he tells me, “then we can go from there.”

Two thousand dollars, and a dream. Maybe you can go home again.