File:St. Stephen's Serbian Orthodox Church, Lackawanna, New York - 20221110.jpg

English: St. Stephen's Serbian Orthodox Church, 177 Weber Road at Abbott Road, Lackawanna, New York, November 2022. The church is a 1959 work of the Buffalo-based architectural firm of James, Meadows & Howard, who with this "Syro-Byzantine" (as contemporaneous press coverage termed it) design eschew their then-timely focus on Midcentury Modernism in favor of a much more traditional aesthetic that comprises such features as multitudinous round arches, heavy massing, a raking arcaded corbel table along the eaves of the front gable, and - most prominently - the trio of arcaded, domed copper cupolas that crown the structure. St. Stephen's as a congregation dates back to 1916, when a church board was set up and Rev. Zarko Trifkovich began holding weekly services in his home whose attendance was drawn from the fraternal organizations set up by the local Serbian community, the presence of which was a testament to the true "melting pot" created by the Lackawanna Steel Company's practice of vigorously recruiting immigrants - not only Serbs and other Eastern Europeans but also Lebanese, Syrians, African-Americans, Latinos, and a rainbow of others - to work in their huge plant. Their original building, constructed in 1918 with financing secured from private donors as well as a $2,500 contribution from the Lackawanna Steel Company, still stands on Church Street in the city's First Ward, and remains in existence as home to Second Baptist Church. Due to increasingly crowded conditions in their original building, St. Stephen's purchased the plot seen here in 1953; the construction process of the present church began in spring 1958, lasted a little over a year, and cost $300,000 in total. Despite the closure of the Lackawanna Steel plant in the early 1980s and the resulting economic and demographic shrinkage of its namesake city, St. Stephen's congregation continued to grow through the 1990s and into the 2000s due to the arrival of refugees fleeing the wars in the former Yugoslavia.