The building is part of a church complex that once housed the German congregation of the Church of the Sacred Heart, founded in 1875 in the Hydraulics and moved in 1915 to this site, proximate to Clinton Street only a few blocks north of the Hydraulics neighborhood. The construction of the 1915 complex was underwritten by the Larkin Company, which purchased the congregation’s original Seneca Street buildings, then adjacent to the Larkin Administration Building, to make way for future plant expansion. In the early 1980s, the Buffalo Diocese closed the Emslie Street complex in the church’s first region-wide deaccessioning, commencing its spiral of decline.

The church’s school building, a handsome load-bearing brick structure with a classic 1910s-era parapet, is now in the late (and possibly final) stage of “demolition by neglect.” Its owners, the Witness Cathedral Church of God in Christ, reportedly abandoned the complex a year ago, suspending church services in the late summer of 2007. According to an official at Buffalo’s Department of Permit & Inspection Services, a demolition permit for the school building was issued one month ago, part of a housing court case dating to 2001. This morning’s partial collapse of the school building facade, imperiling the life and safety of neighbors and pedestrians nearby, adds another frustrating chapter to the ongoing deterioration of the historic church complex.

It is uncertain what, if anything, the current owners intend to do to secure the landmark buidling or mitigate the danger it now poses to the public. Nothing, perhaps – which means you the taxpayer may be left with the tab. What is certain is the demise of the school building, beginning with the callous disposition of the church complex in the early 1980s, was preventable.

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