File:Our Lady of Czestochowa RC Church, North Tonawanda, New York - 20230126.jpg

English: Our Lady of Czestochowa Roman Catholic Church, 626 Oliver Street at Center Avenue, North Tonawanda, New York, January 2023. Dedicated in 1928, this brick church building, the work of the Buffalo-based architectural firm of Dietel & Wade, is exemplary of the Gothic Revival style. Though broadly speaking a popular aesthetic in church architecture of the era, the specific detailing here hearkens back to an earlier phase of the style: eschewing English-derived later forms such as the large central window and bulky castlelike massing, here we see a fully realized emphasis on the vertical, more in keeping with the 19th-century version of Gothicism: note the narrowness and sharply pointed arches on the triple windows at the center of the façade and the louvers of the belfry, the tall spindly spire, and the numerous stepped buttresses that climb the exterior walls. The interior is decorated with a sumptuous mural of the Coronation of the Blessed Mother painted by local artist Joseph Mazur and unveiled on the occasion of the parish's 50th anniversary, is lit by stained glass windows depicting the Polish-born saints Casimir, Stanislaus Kostka, and Stanislaus Szczepanow as well as scenes from Polish history such as Abbott Augustyn Kordecki praying for protection during the siege of Jasna Góra in 1655, and contains a locally-built Wurlitzer organ. Serving the mainly Polish-American population of Ironton, a neighborhood of North Tonawanda gathered along the riverbank north of downtown, Our Lady of Czestochowa was founded as a parish in 1903 under the direction of Buffalo bishop James Quigley, and worshiped initially in a former Presbyterian church that had been converted for Catholic use. That wood-frame building was located immediately north of the present church, on what's now the site of the grotto garden, and was sold and moved off the property in 1927. Masses were then held in the basement of the school on a temporary basis pending the completion of the present building. Our Lady of Czestochowa survived unscathed the Buffalo diocese's late 20th- and early 21st-century series of parochial mergers and reorganizations, absorbing the congregation of the former Saint Joseph church in 2008 and continuing today as an active parish.