Image: Former St. Stephen's Evangelical Church, former(?) Emmanuel Temple Seventh-Day Adventist Church - Buffalo, New York - 20200708

Description: The former St. Stephen's Evangelical Church, 300 Adams Street at Peckham Street, Buffalo, New York, July 2020. A longstanding landmark of this once teeming and solidly German-American neighborhood, the church was built in 1911 to a Gothic Revival design that was the work of architect Jacob Oberkircher, who employs a pointed-arch motif not only as a topper for windows and doors but also in the corbel tables that frame the façade underneath the eaves of the hipped roof. The imposing and robust central tower that dominates the building is actually a remnant of the predecessor church that once stood on the site, built in 1874 and demolished about 1909; its steeple, removed in 1923, once stood 164 feet in height. St. Stephen's congregation was founded in 1853 and moved to this then-semirural tract of land five years later; it was a mission led by the pastor of St. Paul's Evangelical that sought to minister to the German-American community they correctly predicted would coalesce on the large tract of East Side land owned by real estate speculator Stephen Van Rensselaer Watson. The congregation endured in the neighborhood for a century, then upon the church's 1958 dissolution the building became the second home of Emmanuel Temple Seventh-Day Adventist Church, founded in the 1930s in the Hamlin Park area. In 2018, Emmanuel Temple began sharing a worship space with Zion Missionary Baptist Church on East Ferry Street, though as of the date this photo was taken they still owned the building seen here.
Title: Former St. Stephen's Evangelical Church, former(?) Emmanuel Temple Seventh-Day Adventist Church - Buffalo, New York - 20200708
Credit: Own work
Author: Andre Carrotflower
Usage Terms: Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0
License: CC BY-SA 4.0
License Link: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0
Attribution Required?: Yes