Historic churches of Buffalo’s East Side: a driving tour of grandeur, decline and reuse

The same corner in 2015: the site of St. Mary Redemptorist Church, now occupied by two houses, with St. Mary’s Lyceum at far right (Photo: Andre Carrotflower, CC BY-SA 4.0).

On Buffalo’s East Side, the tallest and most magnificent building in each immigrant neighborhood was the parish church, as it had been in Europe. The grandest were palaces that equalled anything in their parishioners’ homelands, symbols of the prosperity they had come for. The immigrants’ descendants have almost all moved away, but many of the churches remain. A Wikivoyage driving tour, 20.5 miles long, takes in the most magnificent, their architecture and the communities that worshiped in them.

Why so many churches

In the 1840s, war, political turmoil and religious persecution drove Germans from the region now called Germany, and the flat, fertile land east of downtown Buffalo soon became a bustling German Village. Most Buffalo Germans were well-off and skilled. The East Side grew fastest from 1860 to 1900, and real estate speculators had a trick: after dividing a tract, the owner gave one of the best lots to the Catholic Diocese or another religious group for a church, which drew homebuyers and also shaped the neighborhood’s ethnic and religious makeup. For most of the second half of the 19th century Germans were more than half of Buffalo’s population, and for a time some people called for German to be a co-official language. From about 1870 a large Polish community gathered around Fillmore Avenue and Broadway, and by 1900 it made up another 10% of the city.

White residents left for the suburbs through the 20th century, in part because of racial prejudice and the growth of the black community from about the First World War. Church attendance fell, income fell with it, and bills and repairs went unpaid. From the 1990s many East Side churches merged or closed. Bishop Edward Kmiec’s controversial Journey in Faith and Grace program closed or merged nearly a hundred Catholic churches in the Diocese between 2005 and 2008.

Four styles

Fates along the route

Site of a future mosque and Islamic center, the former Catholic church St. Ann (Photo: Andre Carrotflower, CC BY-SA 4.0).

The tour shows that these buildings now have wildly different futures: some remain active congregations, some have been repurposed, and others are abandoned or demolished. Some examples:

• St. Mary Redemptorist was the first church on the East Side, founded in 1843 and headquarters of the local Redemptorists. A pillar of German life, it declined with the neighborhood. By 1981 Mass drew a dozen or two people. It closed, and a fire in the early hours of December 20, 1986 collapsed the steeple. Of the whole complex only St. Mary’s Lyceum, a 1906 school, survives, and it is a Buffalo Landmark.
• St. Ann, established in 1857, is a 175-foot Gothic Revival giant with walls 7 feet thick. Its spires were taken down after a 1964 windstorm. It stayed active until April 2012, and in 2014 it was nominated as a Buffalo Landmark, ending the threat of demolition. A preservation group raised money for repairs, and in 2022 the property was sold to Buffalo Crescent Holdings, which plans to convert it into a mosque with an Islamic cultural center.
• St. Stanislaus is still a cornerstone of its Polish community, and here the church came before the community: in 1872 Joseph Bork, a land speculator of Polish descent, wanted Polish immigrants to settle in Buffalo rather than pass through to other cities.
• Holy Mother of the Rosary Polish National Cathedral, built in 1906 for the Polish National Catholic Church, is now a mosque, and the former St. Agnes is a Vietnamese Buddhist cultural center. The former St. Mary Magdalene thrives as the home of Antioch Missionary Baptist Church.
• St. Gerard, founded in 1902 for a mostly Italian parish, divided preservationists when a Georgia congregation proposed to take the building apart and rebuild it 900 miles south.
• St. Luke was reborn in 1994 as St. Luke’s Mission of Mercy, while some churches became oratories linked to nearby parishes.

The tour ends at Michigan Street Baptist Church, the oldest on the itinerary, a symbol of the African-American community that grew on the East Side in the early 20th century. Interiors of churches that are not active are closed to the public, but exteriors can be viewed any time. Allow at least three hours and a car, starting at the corner of Broadway and Michigan Avenue. The East Side’s churches are far apart and the bus network is not enough to make this a transit tour.

Sources

• Wikivoyage contributors, Historic churches of Buffalo's East Side, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0; photographs by Andre Carrotflower, CC BY-SA 4.0. Changed here: condensed to an overview, with stop-by-stop directions, restaurant and shop listings and most photographs left out; rewritten in hubnx’s own words.