File:St. Andrew RC Church, Tonawanda, New York - 20210905.jpg

English: St. Andrew Roman Catholic Church, 1525 Sheridan Drive at Elmwood Avenue, Tonawanda, New York, September 2021. The design of this 1962-vintage edifice of rough-textured, randomly-coursed stone blends Classicism with Modernism in a manner that was common in the church architecture of the era: the façade looking onto Elmwood Avenue presents a modernized version of a Greek temple front, with pilaster strips flanking a triple entrance and a projecting pediment with a bas-relief of Saint Andrew in the tympanum. However, elsewhere on the building, the angular minimalism and sleek planar surfaces of midcentury architecture predominate. Among the first wave of new Catholic parishes to be founded in Buffalo's outskirts as a result of the mid-20th century trend of suburbanization, St. Andrew's was founded in 1944 with the Rev. James F. Donovan, formerly of St. Anthony's in rural Farnham, holding the first Mass in the chapel of nearby Mount St. Mary's Academy for a flock of 400 faithful largely hailing from the WWII-era Sheridan Parkside public housing development. Construction of a dedicated building, which normally would have begun more or less immediately, had to be postponed due to wartime construction materials rationing, so the flock continued worshipping in temporary locations (first Mount St. Mary's, then the Sheridan Parkside Administration Building) until 1949, when their first home, a combination church and school building facing Sheridan Drive just to the east of the present church, was completed. It became clear almost immediately, in the wake of a parish population whose sustained exponential growth came first from the return of overseas GIs and later through the postwar baby boom, that a larger building would soon be necessary; hence the current structure, whose construction began in 1960. Today, aside from continuing to serve a vibrant congregation, the parish is also notable as home of St. Andrew's Country Day School, one of the highest-rated schools in the Buffalo diocese which educates a matriculation of about 250 students from pre-kindergarten through eighth grade using the Modern Socratic teaching method, the only school in the Northeastern U.S. to utilize those techniques.