File:St. Mark's Episcopal Church, North Tonawanda, New York - 20220611.jpg

English: St. Mark's Episcopal Church, 61 Payne Avenue at Tremont Street, North Tonawanda, New York, June 2022. While the simplified forms and L-shaped floor plan typified the church architecture of the era of its construction (1928), the Romanesque Revival styling decidedly did not - nor is it a usual trope in the work of the Buffalo-based firm of North & Shelgren, who, like most in the early to mid-20th century, favored Late Gothic designs such as that of Kenmore Methodist Church which was unveiled a few miles away the same year. Note how the façade is characterized by warm earth tones and centered on a pair of twin round-arched windows separated by an engaged column with stylized Corinthian capital, and also how the bottom-heavy massing is accentuated by the horizontal stone courses on the main façade and the squat pyramidal roof of the tower. St. Mark's own website traces its history back at least as far as 1838, when a group supposedly met in a brick schoolhouse at what's now the site of First Methodist Church. However, the congregation as such was founded in 1869 and worshipped in a modest wood-frame structure four blocks to the west at the corner of Marion Street. Planning for construction of the present structure began in 1920 when it acquired the deed to lot on which it stands, a bequest from the heirs of the recently deceased local businessman Stanley G. Peuchen.