File:First Shiloh Baptist Church, Buffalo, New York - 20230105.jpg

English: First Shiloh Baptist Church, 15 Pine Street at Swan Street, Buffalo, New York, January 2023. Dedicated in November 1965 after a construction process just over a year in length, this stout, sprawling brick building combines an 850-seat sanctuary with a three-story wing that was originally used for Sunday school classrooms, summer Bible school, and other faith-based educational programming. A design of the locally-based architectural practice of Shelgren, Patterson & Marzec, it's a good example of the fairly conservative take on Modernism that typified the firm's work at the time, wherein the traditional elements and tropes of ecclesiastical architecture are all present albeit in simplified form. The smooth-textured surfaces, sleek lines, and austere appearance are all Modern hallmarks, while the narrow tower with its open belfry and spindly steeple find echoes in the firm's roughly contemporaneous designs for Randall Memorial Baptist Church in Amherst and Greece Baptist Church just outside Rochester. Part of what could be called the second generation of African-American churches to be founded in the Buffalo area, First Shiloh traces its history back to 1916, when a group of families split from the Michigan Street Baptist Church to found Buffalo's second Black Baptist congregation. Operating out of storefronts for the first half-dozen years of its history, in 1922 the congregation found itself at odds with the Buffalo Public Schools on the question of who should purchase the vacant building previously home to the Cedar Street Baptist Church; the unique agreement the two parties struck was that the church would purchase the property and lease it to the city government for weekday use as an annex to Public School No. 6. In return, the city would finance building enlargements and improvements. The Cedar Street church remained their home until their present one - at that time was the largest new building to be constructed in the Ellicott District Renewal Area, a 36-square-block expanse of Near East Side land that had been leveled in 1959 in the name of slum clearance - was ready for occupancy.