A Brief History of Central Presbyterian Church

Central was founded on November 14, 1835 by thirty-five men and women, most of whom had been members of First Presbyterian Church of Buffalo. They selected a site just north of Genesee Street and called their first pastor, the Rev. John C. Lord, a young conservative of the "old school" who was to achieve national prominence. Dr. Lord served as Pastor for 38 years.

In 1837, the congregation erected a remarkable new church building which was said to be an exact copy of the Parthenon in Athens. It was elliptical in the interior and had no windows other than a huge oval stained glass skylight in the roof. Its shape earned the name the "goose egg church." This building had to be demolished only twelve years later because of serious structural flaws.

In 1852, the church built a new home at the corner of Genesee and Pearl Streets (where the Hyatt Regency Hotel has now erected an addition). This was a large stone structure in the Anglo-Norman style of architecture. Over the years, it came to be referred to as the "Presbyterian Cathedral of Buffalo." The name of the church was changed to Central Presbyterian Church. The congregation worshiped in that structure until 1911.

The congregation had long felt a deep commitment to maintaining a Presbyterian presence in the city center, even as other Presbyterian congregations moved north to the outskirts of North Street and to the newly named Lafayette Avenue.  The decision to abandon the downtown location was therefore difficult.    However, when the Shea Amusement Company approached Central with a purchase offer for its property, to become the site of the Majestic Theater, the people of Central accepted and began to make plans to develop their ministry in the expanding, new northern limits of Buffalo, now called Parkside.

In 1909 the Park Presbyterian Church, organized in 1893 in a small chapel still standing on Elam Place, merged with Central as it prepared to move into its new structure at Main and Jewett. This move to Parkside was propitious. Many residents of the new homes in the area also found a new church home at Central. Between 1914 and 1926, membership burgeoned from 688 to 3,378 members under the dynamic leadership of Dr. Robert M. MacAlpine. In 1921, an audacious engineering feat attracted national attention as the entire Main Street wall of the building was moved intact a distance of 40 feet to accommodate the membership in a sanctuary with seating for 1200.