File:Blessed Sacrament RC Church, Buffalo, New York - 20200601.jpg

English: Blessed Sacrament Roman Catholic Church, 1035 Delaware Avenue, Buffalo, New York, June 2020. A magnificent Gothic Revival building of red brick and Medina sandstone erected in 1889 and greatly enlarged by architect Albert A. Post in 1908, the eyes are drawn immediately to the large rose window dominating the rusticatd front façade, whose stained glass presents a floral motif, and then move southward to the entrance, crowned with a compound arches, flanked by Gothic-style columns with foliated capitals, and with a quatrefoil pattern and alpha-and-omega symbolism in the tympanum. The parapet gable above is pierced by a trio of small lancet windows, crowned by a Celtic cross, and flanked by stout finial-topped pinnacles. Inside is a set of majestic stained glass windows crafted in Innsbruck as well as a pair of altars imported from Italy; one of marble salvaged from the recently demolished Church of San Salvatore in Thermis that was blessed in 590 AD by St. Gregory the Great and contains a number of relics including pieces of the Holy Cross; the other dating to the 17th century and sourced from the chapel of a church in Rome. Blessed Sacrament traces its history back to a small chapel built in 1885 adjacent to a new residence that had been built for the bishop (no longer extant), who had heretofore resided in the rectory of St. Joseph's Cathedral downtown in what was by then no longer a residential area. The Masses said in the chapel by the bishop soon attracted large crowds from the nearby neighborhood of Cold Spring, a burgeoning community of Germans who had no nearby Catholic church to attend; correspondingly, Blessed Sacrament became a parish in its own right in 1887. The building was slated for another round of expansion in 1912, only four years after its first, when the bishop announced the construction of a new cathedral at the corner of Delaware Avenue and West Utica Street; as part of the rearrangement of the church site to accommodate the new building, Blessed Sacrament was lifted from its foundation and moved 200 feet backward from its original position near Delaware Avenue; at the time the largest brick church in the U.S. to ever be physically relocated. The Blessed Sacrament parish was dissolved in 1915 upon the competion of the new cathedral and the building used as its chapel; however, upon the cathedral's 1976 demolition, it was reconstituted and remains an active church in the Buffalo diocese.