English: Our Mother of Good Counsel Roman Catholic Church, 3688 South Park Avenue at Elmwood Avenue, Blasdell, New York, October 2022. Built in 1952 to a design by local architect Edward A. Pauly, this is a fine example of the Late Gothic Revival style popular in local church architecture of the era, where the influence of Modernism is clearly evident in the building's sleek lines and simplified forms. Characteristic features of Gothicism visible here include prominent vertical lines; stepped buttresses set between pairs of tall, narrow windows on the side elevations, and entrances deeply recessed within compound pointed arches both in front and at the sides of the truncated transept. Note also the niche statue of the Virgin Mary in the parapet at the peak of the front gable. Contrastingly, the small size of the round rose window adds a touch of the Romanesque aesthetic. Though the present-day church and its associated outbuildings are relics of the parish's mid-20th century expansion in tune with the wave of suburbanization that was occurring in America at the time, Our Mother of Good Counsel is actually a fair deal older than that: it traces its history to the late 1890s, when Monsignor Nelson Baker - arguably the most famous native son of the immediate southern periphery of Buffalo, who helmed the massive Catholic charitable institutions of
Our Lady of Victory at Limestone Hill (now Lackawanna) - correctly foresaw that the impending opening of the enormous
Lackawanna Steel Plant would lead to a sharp increase in the local population, and accordingly set up a mission church to minister to the spiritual needs of those newcomers who were Catholic. A full-fledged parish by 1905, Our Mother of Good Counsel's original combination church and school building was completed the following year on the same site as the present one and served the parish community for the next 47 years, first through the service of visiting missionary priests and then, beginning in 1908, a resident one. More recently, the church's architectural and historical importance led it to be listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2020.