Entry No. 37 — the Buffalo file — filed under: history
Buffalo Religious Arts Center
When Western New York's churches began closing in waves, founder Mary Holland started collecting what was inside them; since 2008 the former St. Francis Xavier Church in Black Rock has filled with the result. The collection runs to statuary, stained glass windows, murals, oil paintings, and metalwork, most of it made by European immigrant craftsmen in the early 1900s for congregations that no longer exist. Visits are docent-led and by appointment, which in practice means you call, name a time, and get a private walk through several churches' worth of salvaged saints. Explore Buffalo also routes its Sacred Spaces tours through the building, with proceeds split back to historic houses of worship, and the center still fundraises each year just to keep the building heated.
→ Three more unusual museums & collections in Buffalo — never the same twice
The story
In 2007 the Diocese of Buffalo consolidated dozens of parishes out of existence, and Mary Holland read about it in the paper. She started driving to the churches on the list before they shut. What worried her was not the buildings but what was bolted inside them: she had heard of Buffalo windows turning up in Las Vegas and baptismal fonts repurposed as drink coolers. In 2008 she bought one of the closed churches outright and made it the place to put the rest.
The church she bought is St. Francis Xavier, built for a German Catholic parish whose 1894 school still stands next door as the oldest building on the complex. The Romanesque basilica-style church, 12,000 square feet, was designed by Max Beierl of Lansing and Beierl and completed in 1913. The murals around the main and side altars are by Raphael Pfisterer, a Bavarian-born Benedictine monk: Holy Trinity above, St. Francis Xavier at center, saints and the twelve apostles below. The ceiling was painted by Josef Vargas, a Hungarian immigrant living in Black Rock. The Stations of the Cross are stained glass from F.X. Zettler's Munich workshop, each with a scrap of real wood fixed to the cross because church law required wood.
Church, rectory and school went on the National Register in August 2009, and the nave has since filled with salvage from more than 45 shuttered congregations: 50-plus stained glass windows, six backlit in frames and several set into the old confessionals, statuary carved by Italian, Polish and Danish-born immigrants, and a hundred more pieces in storage awaiting restoration. It is not only Catholic — a brass Ten Commandments tablet and a Star of David window came from Temple Beth El. A volunteer staff runs the place, and the furnace can never go fully off in winter or Pfisterer's murals would peel.
What it's like
There is no front desk and no posted walk-in hours, so the visit starts on the phone: you call 716-481-2350, name a time, and a docent meets you at 157 East Street. Parking is free. What follows is a private walk down a room that still reads unmistakably as a nave — altars, confessionals, organ loft — except the pews have given way to rescued saints standing in ranks, each with a provenance the docent can name. Admission is $12 adults, $10 seniors, $8 students, cash-and-conversation scale rather than gift-shop scale. Ask questions; the docents deal in specific churches and specific families, and parishioners who grew up here still come through and correct the record. Between October and April, wear a coat indoors.
The move: Call 716-481-2350 and book a docent tour for two — appointment-only here means the whole nave of rescued statuary to yourselves for $12 a head — then walk over to Amherst Street's restaurant strip in Black Rock and argue about which saint was watching you.
📍 Before you go Tours are by appointment only — call 716-481-2350 or email [email protected]; admission $12 adults, $10 seniors, $8 students. No reliable walk-in hours, so don't just show up. It's a big old church with heating costs the nonprofit fundraises to cover, so dress warm in the cold months.
- 📍 Buffalo
- 💸 $
- ⚡ Up for anything
- 🌗 Indoors
Where: 157 East St, Buffalo, NY 14207
Hours: Added 2026-08-25 — confirm current hours before you go.
⚠ Seasonal or scheduled — always check before you go.
Pair it with
- Buffalo Maritime Center — Also in Black Rock's 14207, a mile away at 90 Arthur Street — the other volunteer-run shed in this neighborhood where a few hundred people spend their weekends saving things by hand, only there it's boats instead of saints.
- Assembly House 150 — The opposite verdict on a dead church: Dennis Maher keeps the old Immaculate Conception altar but rebuilds everything around it into new salvage architecture, where Holland's project is to hold a 1913 interior exactly still.
- The Old Chapel Antique & Artisan Market — North Tonawanda's Ascension Church closed in the same 2007 Diocese consolidation that set Holland off, and became antique stalls trading under its own stained glass — the third thing that happens to these buildings.
More weird in Buffalo
Good to know
Can I just show up?
No. Tours are by appointment only — call 716.481.2350 or email [email protected] and agree on a time. The center closes for major holidays. Admission is $12 adults, $10 seniors, $8 students, and parking is free.
Where exactly is it, and is it hard to find?
157 East Street in Black Rock, on Buffalo's northwest side, a few blocks off the I-190. Holland chose it partly for that: close to downtown, easy off the expressway, with its own free parking rather than street-hunting in a dense neighborhood.
Is there another way in besides booking a private tour?
Yes — Explore Buffalo uses the building as one of its Sacred Spaces sites, a program covering fifteen landmark houses of worship around the city. Proceeds from each Sacred Spaces tour are shared back with the participating congregation to help maintain its building.
Do I need to be Catholic, or religious at all, to get anything out of it?
No. The collection is deliberately cross-denominational — Holland's line is that they will preserve anything sacred from any church, and the Temple Beth El pieces are on loan from a closed synagogue. The pitch is immigrant craftsmanship: poor Bavarian, Hungarian, Italian, Polish and Danish workers who left behind glass and carving nobody commissions anymore.
Why is it cold, and does that change by season?
It is a 12,000-square-foot 1913 church heated by a nonprofit. The heat cannot be shut off entirely even in the dead of winter, because the altar murals would fade and peel, and paying that bill is a standing fundraising problem — organ concerts here have asked $10 at the door explicitly to heat the building. Dress warm October through April.
Plan a visit & invite your people →
Further reading: Official site
last checked: 2026-08-25