File:St. Amelia RC Church, Tonawanda, New York - 20210622.jpg

English: St. Amelia Roman Catholic Church, 2999 Eggert Road at Saint Amelia Drive, Tonawanda, New York, June 2021. One of the most architecturally striking of the Modernist-style suburban Catholic churches in the Diocese of Buffalo, the building's design was the work of architect Ed Egan, also a St. Amelia's parishioner. The main worship space (seen at left here) consists of a low-slung hexagonal building whose shallow-pitched pyramidal roof peaks with a vaguely cupola-like dome and a wirelike spire piercing the air like a needle. Facing the parking lot at the end of a stubby vestibule is a soaring front entrance reminiscent of the Brutalist-style churches designed around the same time by Marcel Breuer, framed by a pair of cast concrete panels. Like the majority of parishes in Buffalo's inner-ring suburbs, St. Amelia's owes its existence to the wave of suburbanization that, beginning around the 1920s but especially after the Second World War, pushed America's affluent citizens outside the boundaries of cities proper. Bishop Joseph Burke of the Buffalo diocese recognized the need for new parishes to serve these newly minted suburbanites, and St. Amelia - which Burke founded in 1953, named after his mother, and staffed with his own secretary, Monsignor John Lodge McHugh, as head pastor - was among them. The first few Masses were held in donated facilities, such as the auditorium of Mount St. Mary Academy or outdoors on the grounds of Brighton Fire Hall - during the two years in which the original church (now in use as a gymnasium) was under construction. The school, too, was completed in 1955 and is seen at the right-hand side of the photograph. By 1960, Tonawanda had earned the distinction of being the first suburban community in the U.S. to surpass 100,000 in population, and growth of St. Amelia's parish was equally meteoric - the school building was expanded repeatedly on its way to the status as the largest one in the Buffalo Diocese, and when the second and current church building was completed in 1970, it too had the largest seating capacity of any in the diocese, with room for 1,500 congregants.