File:Iglesia de Dios El Shaddai - fmr First Swedish Evangelical Mission, Bremen Street Bible Students Church et al. - Buffalo, New York - 20220712.jpg

English: Iglesia de Dios El Shaddai, 27 Bremen Street, Buffalo, New York, July 2022. Architect S. H. Woodruff's design for this 1902-vintage brick church has been the victim of some tasteless alterations in the ensuing years, but the discerning eye can still pick out the essence of the original aesthetic, namely a heady mix of Gothic and Romanesque. The two pointed-arched windows in the tower were once matched by a much larger one on the main façade, and the ornate woodwork in the belfry is intact and as gorgeous as ever, but the latter style is echoed by the building's heavy massing and especially the squat dimensions of the spire. The building began its life as home of the First Swedish Evangelical Mission Church, the only one of its denomination in the local area, which had been founded in 1890 to serve the spiritual needs of a small, tight-knit Swedish-American community made up largely of folks who had migrated east from the town of Pullman, Illinois. The congregation struggled in its early years due to low membership and limited funds, holding services in rented spaces, but found stability under the able leadership of Rev. Peter E. Sandberg, a native of Umeå, Sweden by way of the vibrant Swedish-American community of nearby Jamestown, New York. Among Rev. Sandberg's accomplishments were the stabilization of the church's finances, the foundation of branch missions on the East Side and at the Lackawanna Steel Plant and, ultimately, the construction of this first permanent home for the congregation. One drawback of the new building was its location, relatively distant from the homes of most of its members and from the downtown core where most of their previous rented spaces had been located. This controversy brewed until their move in 1915 to the former West Side Presbyterian Church on Jersey Street. Their final location was on Kenmore Avenue in North Buffalo. As for the Bremen Street building, it spent the ensuing decades alternately playing host to a series of short-tenured religious congregations (the Salvation Army briefly occupied the place in the very early 1920s; First Pentecostal Holiness Church, Christ Temple Apostolic Church, and the Apostolic Gospel Tabernacle all came and went before the end of the '30s) and vacant, with the exception of the apartments in the rear of the building which were almost always occupied. In 1959, the building finally landed a long-term owner in the Bremen Street Bible Students Church, a nondenominational congregation which remained active until 1988. It's now home to the Iglesia de Dios El Shaddai, a Pentecostal congregation that hosts Spanish-language services for the local Puerto Rican and Dominican community.