King Center Charter School: St. Mary of Sorrows Roman Catholic Church - Buffalo, NY
New York
King Center Charter School, formerly St. Mary of Sorrows Roman Catholic Church Buffalo, NY
PROJECT DETAILS
Project Name: King Center Charter School
Historic Name: St. Mary of Sorrows Roman Catholic Church
Denomination: Catholic
Architect: Adolphus Druiding
Construction Date: 1891
Date of Closure: 1974
Date of Renovation: 1986-1996
Address: 938 Genesee Street Buffalo, NY 14211
Neighborhood: East Side
Reuse: (Principal) Charter school (Secondary) Community center and library.
Project Scope: New roof, repairs to bell tower, façade cleaning, life safety systems.
Financing: $500,000, NY State Envir. Quality Bond Act $500,000, City of Buffalo $100,000/230,000 (2003), Wendt Foundation $20,000, U.S. Dept. of Educ.
Recognition: Education Award, Southern Christian Leadership Conference, Erie County Chapter
Impact: The new uses of the building and the successful renovation have formed an important component to stabilizing the East Side. The King Urban Life Center has also purchased a house across the street from the church that was a site for drug dealing. It now holds some of the staff offices providing pregnancy prevention education and health care and contains a computer lab.
Neighbors and local leaders who may have been primarily interested in the community uses of a church building also became advocates for its preservation through the creation of the King Center Charter School. The formidable landmark stands at the corner of Genesee and Rich Streets in Buffalo’s East Side neighborhood. The former St. Mary of Sorrows Roman Catholic Church was built in 1891 for a primarily German congregation in a unique Rhenish Romanesque Revival style with local quarried blue limestone. The church building is one of many that dot the skyline of the neighborhood in an area that was previously the home of a wide mixture of first generation immigrants from Germany and Poland. Over time, the surrounding neighborhood has changed with many of the original residents moving to the outlying suburbs.
By the 1980s, the congregation had dwindled to 120 families and the diocese began consolidating parishes in the area. Plans were made to demolish the building due to the building’s deteriorated state. As word of the plans spread through the East Side, a group of community leaders and neighbors pressed the diocese to reconsider their plans and called for the Buffalo Landmark and Preservation Board to designate St. Mary’s a city landmark in order to delay demolition for 180 days. At the urging of the Buffalo Common Council, the Board appointed an eight member “blue--ribbon” committee, consisting of elected officials, attorneys, businessmen, a developer and an architect, to review and assess future uses for the landmark church.
Plans for the restoration and occupation of the building quickly began to focus on creating community resources with an emphasis on early childhood education. The educational component and advocacy for developing new program initiatives lead to a collaboration by twenty presidents of area learning institutions in the Western New York Consortium of Higher Education. Each appointed a student liaison in the field of social work, education, nursing, or administration to sit on "Committee on Inner--City Initiatives.”
At the same time, this collaboration of institutional, political and community leaders also began to negotiate with the diocese to donate the building to the city of Buffalo. The city would then create a grandfather lease for the new non--profit organization calling itself The King Urban Life Center, which had formed strictly for the purpose of ownership and maintenance of the building. With estimates for rehabilitation costs at $1.4 to $2.8 million, members of the blue ribbon committee went to work to secure grants and low interest loans from multiple sources in order to begin restoration work.
The local architecture firm HHL Architects took considerable care to design a space that would allow for multiple uses and adhere to the Secretary of the Interior’s Standards for Rehabilitation. Four classrooms were designed for the sanctuary space with the chancel and altar being left primarily intact.
Overall, the building was structurally sound although the diocese had said that stone blocks were falling off the building. Major work needed to be performed on the roof, and the façade needed to be cleaned. Otherwise, the main design issues focused around how to adapt the building for tenant needs.
With the notion that emphasis on successful early childhood education is a means to combat the poverty of the neighborhood, the organizers began to look at a community center model. The activities of the building would incorporate the classroom facilities used by an area school as well as a television newsroom, computer facilities and after school childcare services.
In recent years, the King Urban Life Center has focused primarily on the operation of The King Center Charter School that leases the building from the holders of the grandfather lease. The activities are extraordinarily diverse, depending on the time of year and day. Long distance educational projects exist in various capacities, such as the Center’s correspondence with a sister school in Costa Rica. Local educational institutions including the University of Buffalo and Buffalo State University use monitoring devices throughout the school to observe and enhance their understanding of education in urban areas.
For more information contact:
Claity Massey
King Center Charter School
938 Genesee Street
Buffalo, NY 14211
(716) 891-7912
www.kingcentercharterschool.org
