File:St. Stanislaus Cemetery new section gates, Pine Ridge Road, Cheektowaga, New York - 20221013.jpg

English: The gates to the so-called "new section" of St. Stanislaus Roman Catholic Cemetery stand on the west side of Pine Ridge Road in Cheektowaga, New York, as seen on an October 2022 evening. The first Polish-American cemetery in Erie County, St. Stanislaus' history traces back to 1888, when the administrators of the neighboring United German & French Cemetery announced to Rev. John Pitass - pastor of St. Stanislaus, Bishop & Martyr, the first and largest Polish Catholic church in the neighboring city of Buffalo - that it would henceforth be closed to burials of people of ethnicities other than its two titular ones. Two years later, what had earlier been the 20-acre farmstead of Samuel Rapin was consecrated for burials not only of parishioners of its namesake church but also of Transfiguration, St. Luke, St. John Kanty, St. Casimir, Assumption, and Holy Apostles SS. Peter & Paul. Acquisition of further land over the next few decades (including the 82 acres on the other side of the road seen here, added in 1912) would multiply the cemetery's size by a factor of six; it would however shrink again in the 1960s, when New York State expropriated 13 acres for the construction of the Kensington Expressway, requiring some remains to be exhumed and reburied. Notable names from among Buffalo's Polish-American community who are interred at St. Stanislaus include former Buffalo mayors Joseph Mruk, Chester Kowal, and Stanley Makowski; Congressmen Chester Gorski and Edmund Radwan; architect Władysław Zawadzki, and Rev. Pitass himself.