English: Ephesus Ministries, 335 Grider Street, Buffalo, New York, June 2020. Built in 1930 in the English Gothic style, the church's design (by Erie, Pennsylvania-based architect George W. Stickle) is typical of those constructed in Buffalo during the period - clusters of pier buttresses framing a large central window bedecked with elegant tracery, a gabled parapet crowning the façade topped with a Celtic cross, a compound Gothic arch at the entrance portal - but the building material decidedly is not; it was constructed largely of cobblestones salvaged from the then-ongoing repaving of Elm Street downtown. The entrance portal and the frontispiece above, the latter centered on a relief of the crucified Jesus, is of fine Indiana limestone. The inside is decorated with beautiful handcrafted woodwork. The building was originally St. Bartholomew Roman Catholic Church, whose parish was founded in 1912 in the East Side neighborhood of Delavan-Grider, which had begun to urbanize not long beforehand thanks to the construction of a streetcar line along Kensington Avenue. Reverend Thomas O'Hern said Mass for a time in a rented house before the dedication of their first building, a brick building designed by architect George Dietel that served as both church and school, in 1914, which was superseded sixteen years later by the present one. The parish boasted a healthy-sized population of 1,000 families in 1962, but shortly thereafter, demographic changes in the neighborhood sent it into a precipitous decline: its parish population by 1972 was half off its peak; the parochial school closed in 1978; the parish entered into a priest-sharing arrangement with neighboring St. Matthew's in 1989 to save money; by 1992 the schedule had been reduced to one Sunday Mass a week; then, finally, the congregation was merged in 1993 with Blessed Trinity as part of a consolidation of inner-city parishes initiated by the Diocese. Constructed in 1913, the former rectory to the south of the church (far right in this photo, mostly obscured by trees) has a notable history of its own, and a dark one at that: it was the site of the murder of Rev. Joseph Bissonnette, the church's then pastor who was one of two Buffalo priests slain in 1987 by the same pair of local teenagers, as well as that of Sister Karen Klimczak in 2006, ironically after it had been converted to a halfway home for former prisoners named the Bissonnette House. The building has been home to Ephesus Ministries, a nondenominational African-American congregation, since 2004.