File:St. Elia Albanian Orthodox Church - fmr Brooklyn Heights Methodist Church - Jamestown, New York - 20210418.jpg

English: St. Elia Albanian Orthodox Church, 103 Palmer Street at Sprague Street, Jamestown, New York, April 2021. Built in 1888, this is a fairly unusual early example of Carpenter Gothic church architecture whose wood-sheathed exterior and earthy color palette afford it an appropriately rustic look, but whose relatively exquisite ornamentation - especially on the tower, with its quartet of pinnacles, ornate wood-carved brackets, and Gothic-arched molding - cribs from the Stick style. Notable also is the varied composition of the façade: board and batten wainscoting covers the base of the building as well as the peaks of the twin cross gables, with layers of clapboard and ornamental shingles sandwiched between, and a rusticated stone foundation undergirding it all. James S. Ellis, the architect and builder, was himself a member of the Brooklyn Heights Methodist Church which was the building's initial owner. The congregation was founded as an attempt to preemptively gain a foothold for that faith in the then-still mostly rural west side of Jamestown, but it took roughly a quarter-century for the anticipated growth of the neighborhood and the church to finally materialize, by which time the neighborhood had begun to accrue a growing community of Albanian-Americans who'd fled poverty and political upheaval in their homeland in favor of easily available jobs in factories and as skilled tradespeople. The Albanian Orthodox church they established was initially located in a small building around the corner on Sprague Street, but in 1956 they purchased this church from the Methodists, and in the words of the website, "it took countless volunteer hours and many hands to convert the church to Orthodox standards". For its part, Brooklyn Heights Methodist remains in existence today under the name New Beginnings Fellowship, worshiping at a location in the neighboring town of Kiantone.