File:Our Lady of Czestochowa RC Church, Cheektowaga, New York - 20220722.jpg

English: Our Lady of Czestochowa Roman Catholic Church, 2158 Clinton Street at Willowlawn Parkway, Cheektowaga, New York, May 2022. One of two parishes in the Diocese of Buffalo named in honor of the famous medieval "Black Madonna" painting in the Jasna Góra Monastery of southern Poland, Our Lady of Czestochowa meets today in a Modern-styled building constructed in 1973, whose architecture is representative of a contemporaneous mini-trend in local church design that favored low-slung, often roundish buildings whose steel-reinforced exterior walls permitted an open floor plan with sightlines unobstructed by pillars or other intrusions. (Other examples include St. Amelia's and Blessed Sacrament, both in nearby Tonawanda). More specifically, Our Lady of Czestochowa's building sports an octagonal footprint, a buff brick exterior, and an entrance recessed behind a pair of engaged brick pillars and a gable-like canopy, with a large stained glass window set above the doors. Topping off the tent roof is a roughly cone-shaped spire with a cross at its peak. Our Lady of Czestochowa traces its history as a parish to 1922, when Buffalo bishop William Turner was petitioned to establish a new parish to serve a Polish-American community whose spread eastward had now taken them from the original enclave of Kazimierzowo, on the far East Side of the city, over the border into the Town of Cheektowaga, in the area now known as Doyle. The fledgling parish held Mass in rented spaces above a grocery store and in a converted horse stable until the 1928 construction of their first home (right), a combination church and school building designed in a handsome Italian Renaissance style. This structure served their needs for 45 years and remains in use as a school and parish hall. Ground was broken for the current church in January 1972, with a cornerstone-laying ceremony held that December to coincide with the parish's 50th anniversary. Our Lady of Czestochowa today is not only still a vibrant faith community but also still majority-Polish, with one Sunday Mass held in that language each week.