English: The former St. John the Evangelist Roman Catholic Church, 2319 Seneca Street at St. John's Parkside, Buffalo, New York, June 2020. The work of the architectural firm of Karl Schmill & Sons, the Romanesque Revival design of the building hearkens back to 14th-century Italian ecclesiastical architecture with its tower- and spireless front-gabled façade of Ohio sandstone and its relative lack of exterior ornamentation (though the spread-winged eagle in the tympanum above the compound-arched entrance and the rinceau pattern on the ranking cornice are nice touches). Inside is a different story, with majestic stained glass windows by the Rambusch Decorating Company of New York City and an apse colorfully painted with exquisite murals depicting scenes from the Book of Revelation, the work of Danish architect Valdemar Kjeldgaard. The second-oldest Catholic parish in South Buffalo, St. John the Evangelist was born in 1907, when a petition circulating among the German-speaking community that heretofore worshiped at St. Teresa's, asking for the foundation of a new parish where business would be conducted in their language, earned the attention of Bishop Charles Colton; however, the rapid growth of the parish population (as well as that of the surrounding neighborhood) meant that the congregation had an English-speaking Irish majority by 1914. The present church dates to 1931 and replaces a smaller combination church/school building also in the Romanesque Revival style, still extant and partly visible in this photo behind and to the left of the main building. The parish endured until 2009, when it was dissolved by the diocese as part of its "Journey in Faith and Grace" consolidation; since then, it's been the subject of two different plans for redevelopment: it was purchased from the diocese in 2014 by local investor Stephen DeFalco who envisioned it as home of an event space he dubbed "The Church", but was resold two years later to Hook & Ladder Development, a group that's earned renown for its work on and around Seneca Street and which plans to convert the building to apartments and commercial space, possibly including a craft brewery.