English: St. Patrick Roman Catholic Church, 97 West Bayard Street at Toledo Street, Seneca Falls, New York, August 2022. A 1931 design of Rochester-based architect Joseph B. Flynn, this Gothic Revival design features rusticated exterior walls of randomly coursed sandstone blocks, a cruciform floor plan, and a symmetrical façade centered on an imposing crenellated tower. The tower containing the building's main entrance, which is recessed behind a bluntly pointed compound arch which, in turn, is crowned with stone relief carvings in heraldic motif and a niche statue of the church's namesake saint. This typical Gothic ornamentation scheme rules the day elsewhere as well: numerous stepped buttresses are intercalated between tall, narrow stained glass windows on the side elevations, while double louvered windows perforate the belfry on all four sides. The Norman influences of the exterior contrast with the interior, which what designed in imitation of 13th-century English churches, with the nave finished in dark wood and accented with more richly colored stained glass to contrast with the lighter tones at the apse, symbolizing the placement of the pastor and altar "in the light of God". The nave was also intended to be lined on each side with statues of saints, but financial considerations after the onset of the Great Depression forced the replacement of that element with fresco paintings of the Stations of the Cross. Unusually, the church is laid out on a north-south axis, reportedly to allow a frontal view of the façade from across the Cayuga-Seneca Canal. Originally known as St. Jerome, the parish was founded in 1831 to serve a community immigrants from Ireland who had arrived shortly earlier to help dig the canal and stayed on afterwards as workers in a variety of canal-adjacent industries. Father Francis O'Donoghue said Mass at first in a modest wood-frame church on nearby Swaby Street, then at a second church on the current site, which was renamed St. Patrick in 1863 in honor of the patron saint of the parishioners' native homeland. The current building, whose cornerstone was laid in October 1929 only a few days before the stock market crash, is their third home. St. Patrick soldiered on as an independent parish until 2013, when a decline in the local Catholic population combined with a shortage of priests compelled a merger with St. Mary's church in neighboring Waterloo. The combined parish, now known as St. Francis and St. Clare, continues to use both buildings for worship.