The Broadway Market at Easter: What It Was, What It Still Is, and Why You Should Go This Year

For generations of WNY families with Polish and Ukrainian roots, a grandmother's annual Easter trip to the Broadway Market was a rite of passage — a ritual as fixed as church on Sunday and the blessing of the basket. Visitors came from across Erie County, often by bus, to work their way through every booth. The kielbasa, the horseradish, the hand-painted eggs: each purchase was its own small act of cultural memory. That tradition is still alive at 999 Broadway, and it still draws thousands of families every Holy Week. ^[2]

What the Broadway Market Is

The building at 999 Broadway was started by a group of citizens on a city-donated parcel and opened in 1888 — that's not a typo, not a rounding. ^[1] 1888. The market is older than cars, older than the radio, older than the Skyway and Main Place Mall and most of the institutions that Buffalonians think of as permanent.

It sits in the Broadway-Fillmore neighborhood on the East Side, which was the heart of Buffalo's Polish community for most of the 20th century. At its peak, the neighborhood around the market was a dense, working-class Polish Catholic world — the kind of place where the church, the market, and the social club were the three pillars of daily life, and where knowing which parish you attended told people everything they needed to know about you. ^[1]

The Broadway Market was that neighborhood's pantry. Not just at Easter — year-round. Meat markets, produce, baked goods, dry goods, specialty items you couldn't find anywhere else in the city. But Easter was always its Super Bowl, to borrow a term.

What Easter at the Market Actually Looks Like

If you've never been to the Broadway Market during Holy Week, description only gets you so far — but it's worth trying.

The kielbasa vendors are the first thing that hits you — the smell of smoked sausage and garlic is aggressive and wonderful, and it starts before you're even inside the building. The best vendors grind their own and smoke it on-site, and the difference between that and what you find at a chain supermarket is not subtle. Thousands of customers packed the market for Good Friday 2026 alone, many of them specifically for the kielbasa. ^[2]

The horseradish grinders are their own category. Visitors consistently describe the fresh-ground horseradish as one of the most sensory experiences at the market — the fresh-ground variety is potent enough to clear sinuses from several feet away, and no jarred product comes close to matching it. It is a staple of the Polish Easter table, and market vendors grinding it fresh maintain a standard that has barely changed in a century. ^[1]

Then there are the eggs. The pysanky — hand-painted Ukrainian Easter eggs — are something that has to be seen to be understood. Some of the designs are geometric, traditional, hundreds of years old. Some are more recent, more personal. The artists working these booths use beeswax and dye with techniques passed down through multiple generations. You can buy one for a few dollars from a table that looks like it's been set up the same way since 1955, because in most essential respects, it has been.

And then there's the lamb cake. Every Polish Easter table needs a lamb cake — a sweet cake baked in a ceramic or cast-iron mold in the shape of a lamb, frosted white, usually decorated with a ribbon and sometimes a small flag. The molds themselves are sold at the market, alongside the finished cakes. Cast-iron lamb cake molds from the 1940s and 1950s regularly appear at estate sales and antique markets in Cheektowaga and surrounding Erie County towns, often selling for $40–$100 — a testament to how widely these traditions once spread across WNY households.

The Part That Deserves Saying

Easter 2026 fell on April 5th. If you missed it, don't miss 2027: Easter falls on March 28th. ^[4] Put it on the calendar now.

The women who run many of these booths — the kielbasa vendors, the pysanky painters, the vendors selling kapusta and ćwikła and babka — represent a generation of Polish and Ukrainian grandmothers who learned these trades in an unbroken chain stretching back to the old country. Some are in their eighties. Some have daughters who will continue. Some don't. That specific knowledge — the actual recipe that came over from Kraków or Lviv, the actual hands that have been painting eggs for sixty years — is finite in a way the building is not.

And the building itself is not standing still. The Broadway Market recently received $45 million in state and local renovation funding — one of the largest investments in its 130-plus-year history. ^[3] The Easter season continues to draw big crowds, with genuine efforts underway to bring new vendors and new energy year-round. The market in 2026 is not a museum, not a dying institution — it's a living one, with real momentum behind it.

For generations of WNY families, the Broadway Market trip was how cultural memory got transmitted — not through textbooks but through tastes, smells, and the patient explanations of the person behind the table. That transmission is still happening. ^[2] Go next year. Bring somebody younger than you. Explain what you're tasting and where it comes from. That's the whole point.

While you're thinking about spring — the market visit, the big holiday meal, the house coming back to life after another Buffalo winter — Vinnie also wrote about getting your Buffalo home ready for the season: furnace checks, window maintenance, the works that every WNY homeowner needs to tackle before summer hits.