File:Our Lady of Hope RC Church - fmr Annunciation RC Church - Buffalo, New York - 20200518.jpg

English: Our Lady of Hope Roman Catholic Church, 248 Lafayette Avenue at Greenwood Place, Buffalo, New York, May 2020. A Gothic Revival masterpiece executed in rough, rustic blocks of Medina sandstone, architect Albert Post brings to bear all the classic hallmarks of the style: Venetian Gothic arches topping the main stained glass window as well as the niche above it, flanked respectively by decorative vertical pier buttresses and a pair of quatrefoil reliefs; finial-topped pinnacles and a pair of Gothic-arched louvered windows adorning the west steeple (left); trios of lancet windows topped with still more Gothic arches on the east steeple; a cross bottony crowning the front gable; buttresses lining the side elevations. The first of what would ultimately be three Roman Catholic parishes on Buffalo's Upper West Side, Annunciation traces its history back to 1885, when the neighborhood was only just beginning to urbanize and local Catholics were vexed by the distance of their weekly trips to attend Mass at Holy Angels or St. John the Baptist; in turn, the foundation of the church itself began to make the neighborhood attractive for further settlement. The small frame church they initially built was replaced by the current structure in 1901, and with time the parish's ethnic constitution evolved from Irish-majority to Italian to Hispanic. In 2009, as part of the Buffalo Diocese's church consolidation program dubbed "Journey in Faith and Grace", the neighboring parishes of Our Lady of Loretto and Nativity merged with Annunciation under the new name Our Lady of Hope, which continues to meet in the building seen here. Additionally, Annunciation's former parochial school building was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2008.