What wasn't there, of course, was Harry G. Ochs Jr., who died a week ago Sunday after a two-year cat-and-mouse game with cancer: He beat back the bladder cancer. And the colon cancer. But the lung cancer finally beat him.
He was 80, a tough bird, and from that center stall, which he manned like the captain of a tugboat, such a fixture - hectoring (the guys), flirting (with the girls) - that it seemed he was an actual piece of the place, a barnacle of a butcher who'd screwed himself into the floor itself.
How strange was it not to have Harry around, 62 years in the business, at work - at that very stall - since he was a teenager (born Finocchio, Italian, not German)?
"It's like walking up," said Carmen DiGuglielmo, the hoagie man, "and the door is not where it's supposed to be."
All week long, since his death, they shared Harry stories. About working with him in the '70s "when the rain came in" and rats roamed the market. About forgetting a purse, one woman remembered, and Harry pulling $100 out of the cash register. About Harry's soft spot for St. John's Hospice, the men's shelter down the block.
"I had my first illegal underage drink with him," volunteered Joe Nicolosi, whose father, Tommy, owns DiNic's Roast Pork. "I mean, my first illegal drink in a bar."
Harry had his posse. Before he got down to work - when he was in his prime - before he broke down hanging sides of beef, dry-aged in a slaughterhouse in Berwyn, before trimming a crown roast of lamb for a holiday table, Harry and Tommy Nicolosi, and Vinnie Iovine, the produce guy, met at center court for a wake-up toot of Grand Marnier.
Was it usually in the coffee? a visitor asked Tommy. Or straight up?
"Yes," said Tommy.
There was much reprising, too, of Harry's finest hour. It was in the mid-'80s, when construction of the Convention Center threatened to close the entire market for months.
