File:KLP Commons - fmr Evangelical Covenant Church of Buffalo - Buffalo, New York - 20220702.jpg

English: KLP Commons, 786 Kenmore Avenue at Harvest Avenue, Buffalo, New York, July 2022. With a handsome red brick façade; a stout, crenellated central tower containing a Palladian window (now partially bricked over) and main entrance recessed behind a compound semicircular arch, and round-arched, fanlight-topped windows intercalated between simple buttresses on the side elevations, this modestly handsome former church boasts a Colonial Revival-style design for which architects North & Shelgren drew up blueprints in 1943. However, the road from conception to groundbreaking to Dedication Day was a six-year ordeal where progress was stymied at every turn due to shortages of building materials during and immediately after World War II. Upon its completion in 1949, building committee chairman Harry Lindahl proudly told the Courier-Express that costs were kept to a relatively modest total of $65,000 due not only to "a good arrangement with the contractor" but also the fact that much of the construction work was undertaken by volunteers from among the 125 members of the congregation itself. The only church of its denomination in the local area, Evangelical Covenant was founded in 1890 to serve the spiritual needs of Buffalo's small, tight-knit Swedish-American community. Originally known as the First Swedish Evangelical Mission, the congregation bounced around the West Side for the first phase of its history (initially at a location on Bremen Street, then at the former West Side Presbyterian Church on Jersey Street) before changing their name and moving to North Buffalo, by which time they'd already ceased using the Swedish language for services and were seeking to expand their ministry to new, growing, and not-necessarily-Scandinavian communities. After vacating the Jersey Street property in 1944, they held services in the Kenilworth Fire Hall in the nearby town of Tonawanda while the Kenmore Avenue church, their third and final permanent home, was under construction. Upon the church's dissolution in 2012, the building was sold to local real estate developer CSS for conversion to apartments; KLP Commons, as it's now called, comprises 13 one- and two-bedroom units divided between the former church, parish house, and Sunday school building.