English: Holy Spirit Roman Catholic Church, 85 Dakota Street, Buffalo, New York, June 2020. Erected in 1930 to a design by architect Edward J. Trautman, the building is a modest-scaled, boxy brick structure that housed both the worship space (on the ground floor) and school (above). Its Modernist style is accentuated with a few simplified Gothic Revival decorative elements on the front façade, namely a compound-arched front entrance, a Gothic-style stained glass window on the second floor with simple tracery, and windows framed by Gibbs surrounds. The parish was founded in 1910 and was the first to serve the North Park section of the city, which had only just begun its transition from farmland to urban neighborhood. The parish remained small initially, though the shrine to Saint Rita installed by the bishop in 1913 made it a popular site for local pilgrimages; at the outbreak of the First World War, the parish's growth began in earnest along with that of North Park as a whole, thanks to increased production at the
Pierce Arrow,
American Radiator, and
Curtiss Aeroplane factories on Elmwood Avenue to fulfill wartime needs. They sold their
original building, a small clapboard structure which they had outgrown, to the North Delaware Avenue Methodist Episcopal Church, who moved it to their property on the corner of Delaware Avenue and Wilbury Place (it's still extant and now home to the New Freedom Assembly of God); ground was broken for the current structure in 1929.