File:St. Andrew's Episcopal Church, Buffalo, New York - 20201221.jpg

English: St. Andrew's Episcopal Church, 3107 Main Street, Buffalo, New York, December 2020. The architecture of this handsome building was the work of the firm of North & Shelgren (mostly that of the senior partner, Robert North). Built of locally quarried limestone with trim in Indiana Limestone, the design hearkens back to the 11th- and 12-century churches of Norman England, with stout massing and relatively simple and restrained exterior ornamentation that in turn recall the earlier Romanesque style. A contrast is drawn with the design of the tracery in the enormous central leaded-glass window facing Main Street, which has more in common with the Perpendicular Gothic style of the 15th century (the inspiration for most of Buffalo's Gothic Revival ecclesiastical architecture of the era). St. Andrew's has its roots on the Near East Side, and the congregation's early history was fraught with starts and stops: it traces its foundation to the establishment of a German-language Sunday school by a group of (anglophone) laypeople from the congregation of St. Paul's downtown. Meeting originally in a rented space above a grocery store at the corner of Genesee and Michigan Streets, it became a full-fledged congregation in 1875 and remained so for nine years, until its pastor's departure for a larger church in Ellicottville led to its dissolution. Renamed St. Andrew's, the church was reconstituted in 1886, this time with services led directly by the pastor at St. Paul's, but this proved short-lived: due to extenuating circumstances resulting from the fire which destroyed their church downtown, St. Paul's pastor could no longer spare the time to do double duty at St. Andrew's, and so the frame chapel they'd constructed on Spruce Street was vacated again. In 1891, St. Andrew's was revived for a second time, this time permanently, due to the efforts of Rev. Thomas B. Berry of the Church of the Good Shepherd in Parkside. They moved the next year to a larger church on Goodell Street (later the home of St. Philip's Church; now destroyed), which was superseded by the present building in 1929.