English: St. Francis of Assisi Roman Catholic Church, 150 Broad Street at Clinton Park, Tonawanda, New York, February 2023. A work of prominent local architect George Dietel, the design of this 5,720-square-foot church building might best be described as a Modernized take on the Italian Romanesque style. With a structure of steel-reinforced concrete veneered in brick and stone (the latter figuring in the rusticated central portion of the façade), the aesthetic is exemplified by the building's stout and sprawling massing, the shallow pitch of the roof, the relative smallness of the central rose window and its setting within a massive blind arch at the center of the façade, and Mediterranean-flavored decorative elements such as the raking arcaded corbel tables underneath the eaves and the openwork belfry crowning the hip-roofed tower at rear. Note also the niche statue of the parish's namesake above the entrance. The earliest of what would ultimately be six Roman Catholic parishes serving the twin cities of Tonawanda and North Tonawanda, St. Francis of Assisi traces its history back to August 1849, when Buffalo bishop John Timon dispatched the Rev. Sergius Schoulepnikoff to minister to the citizens of what was that a rapidly growing lumbering port at the mouth of Tonawanda Creek, near the west end of the Erie Canal. Though the Rev. Schoulepnikoff was Russian-born, the local Catholic community at the time was mostly of German and Alsatian heritage; accordingly, by 1853 - the year after the formal foundation of the parish - he had been succeeded in his post by the Rev. Francis Uhrich, the first in a nearly unbroken string of German-speaking pastors who would preach at St. Francis for the following half-century plus. The original wood-frame chapel on Franklin Street was superseded in 1862 by its first proper church building, a handsome stone structure erected by mason and parish trustee Constantine Schimminger that served the congregation for nearly a century thereafter. By the 1890s, St. Francis had grown exponentially and boasted a parochial school and a convent (the former still operational; the latter closed in 1990), a growth that caused increasingly crowded conditions that were further exacerbated by the post-World War II move of the middle classes out of inner cities which turned Tonawanda, once more or less an independent entity, increasingly into a satellite suburb of nearby Buffalo. By the time plans for the construction of the building seen here was announced in March 1954, the parish population had ballooned to a tally of 4,000. The $300,000 construction process was completed in June of the following year, with dedication ceremonies doubling as a celebration of the 50th anniversary of the ordination to the priesthood of St. Francis' head pastor, Msgr. John Weismantel. The inaugural Mass was preceded by a jubilant procession along Adam Street in which marchers included Msgr. Weismantel, Buffalo bishop Joseph Burke, the color guards of the Tonawanda and Buffalo Councils of the Knights of Columbus, and representatives from numerous neighboring Catholic parishes. St. Francis of Assisi remains today among the larger and more active parishes in the Buffalo diocese.