File:Former St. Paul's & St. Mark's United Church of Christ, Buffalo, New York - 20210209.jpg

English: The former St. Paul's & St. Mark's United Church of Christ, 187 Niagara Street at West Huron Street, Buffalo, New York, February 2021. Built in 1987 to a design by the locally-based firm of Stieglitz Snyder, this striking example of Late Modern ecclesiastical architecture is unique in the Buffalo area. The exterior of the triangular building is centered on a brick corner tower whose sleek, geometric angularity and almost complete lack of ornamentation exemplify the style well. The rear of the tower slopes back diagonally toward the flat roof, and it's flanked by repetitive rows of recessed rectangular clerestory windows that hint at a Brutalist influence as they extend toward either edge of the sloped ridge on the roofline of the hypotenuse side of the building. These side wings are cantilevered widely over semi-enclosed terraces leading to the building's twin entrances at the base of the corner tower. Belying the relative newness of the building is the age of the congregation: it traces its history back to the foundation of the German (later St. Paul's) United Evangelical Church in 1843, which met first in a building on Washington Street between Genesee and East Chippewa Streets (currently the site of the M&T Center parking lot), and then beginning in 1881 on Ellicott Street where the parking lot behind the Eastman Machine Company building is today. St. Mark's Evangelical Church was a splinter congregation that left St. Paul's in 1883 due to a dispute over the organist's choice of musical selections for the services; they held services at a building on Oak Street at the present-day site of the parking ramp behind the Catholic Health Building before the two factions reconciled in 1929, reuniting under their ultimate moniker and with services once again held at the Ellicott Street site. Rendered homeless in 1970 when their building was seized by eminent domain and demolished to make way for the never-built West Side Connector expressway, the congregation bounced around several temporary locations before their 1985 purchase of the land on which this building stands. St. Paul's & St. Mark's remained in the building until the congregation's 2013 dissolution due to a much-diminished membership tally. The building has been vacant since then, and passed through the hands of several different owners.