File:St. Philip's Episcopal Church - fmr St. Clement's Episcopal Church - Buffalo, New York - 20200817.jpg

English: St. Philip's Episcopal Church, 18 Sussex Street, Buffalo, New York, August 2020. Erected in 1917, the building's relatively simple Gothic Revival design was the product of architect G. W. Butler, who's surrounded the requisite massive Gothic-arched front window (covered today with modern siding) with a cut-stone Gibbs surround, and placed the main entrance on the west side of the façade, underneath a more bluntly pointed arch in what appears to be the base of a never-completed tower. St. Clement's was an Episcopal congregation that was founded in 1896 as a mission of the no-longer-extant Episcopal Church of St. Barnabas in Cold Spring, chiefly thanks to the work of prominent local attorney Harlow C. Curtiss. The congregation merged in 1973 with that of St. James in Kensington-Bailey, where it continues in existence under the name St. Michael & All Angels. The building then became the new home of an even more historic Episcopal congregation, the first and still the only one in the Episcopal Diocese of Western New York with a majority-black membership, which had spent its initial years on Goodell Street in the Fruit Belt before their building fell victim to urban renewal. Today, services at St. Philip's blend the traditionally Episcopalian with twists that speak to the African-American identity of its members — for example, there's both a traditional and a gospel choir — and it's also the home church of the local chapter of the Union of Black Episcopalians.