File:St. Patrick RC Church, Elmira, New York - 20220723.jpg

English: St. Patrick Roman Catholic Church, 604 Park Place at West Clinton Street, Elmira, New York, July 2022. An 1874 work by an unknown architect, this is a splendid example of Victorian Gothicism, brimming with design elements and decorative baubles that ably demonstrate the eclecticism of the style: classic Gothic tropes such as pointed arches, slender spires, numerous stepped buttresses, and an overall vertical orientation commingle with Romanesque elements in the form of the small wheel window under the gable on the church's east side elevation (far right) and the corbel table at the top line of the shorter of the two towers. You'll even see a touch of the French Second Empire on the latter tower, capped by an octagonal mansard-like drum pierced with pediment-topped mock dormers. Foremost in the viewer's eye, however, is the large, unusually shaped stained-glass window (the work of the Pittsburgh firm of S. S. Marshall & Brother, as with the others in the church) that's recessed by limestone rustications into the pointed portion of a Gothic arch truncated on the bottom by the gablet-topped, buttress-flanked main entrance. The interior originally featured furnishings and wainscoting in ash, cherry and walnut, and the walls were decorated with colorful fresco paintings including a full-length portrait of Saint Patrick himself behind the altar. The third of what would eventually be six Roman Catholic parishes set up in Elmira, St. Patrick's traces its history back to 1869, an era in which the city's North Side was in a period of booming growth thanks to the nearby establishment of the Reed & Cooper iron foundry. In response, Bishop Stephen Ryan of the Diocese of Buffalo, of which Elmira was then a part, dispatched Reverend P. R. Hopkins that year to head up the new parish that would serve the neighborhood's mostly Irish-American population, for which he purchased a lot "on one of the most prominent and sightly spots in the whole city, on a rise of ground looking down Main Street, one of the finest of our avenues to the river" (quoting from an article in the Daily Advertiser some years later). Rev. Hopkins' assignment was cut short in less than a year due to his untimely death, and it was his replacement, Rev. James J. Bloomer, who oversaw the construction of the temporary wooden "shanty church" whose small size was, by its completion in 1871, already too small to accommodate all the parish's worshippers. Construction of the current structure, therefore, began immediately despite strained financial resources (it's said that parishioners took it upon themselves to buy bricks to drop off at the construction site). A convent and school were built on a plot diagonally across from the church in 1884 and 1894 respectively. Rev. Bloomer continued serving the parish until his death in 1931 at the age of 90; his was at that time the longest continual period of service to the same parish of any Catholic priest in the United States. Due to a nationwide decrease in the Catholic churchgoing population, St. Patrick's is no longer an independent parish, but rather has been downgraded to one of six buildings used for worship by the new Most Holy Name of Jesus parish whose boundaries encompass the entire city.