Image: St. Matthew RC Church, East Syracuse, New York - 20210306

Description: St. Matthew Roman Catholic Church, 229 West Yates Street at Kinne Street, East Syracuse, New York, March 2021. A very late-period yet also very typical example of Romanesque Revival church architecture, St. Matthew's is a village landmark where virtually all of the classic characteristics of the style are well represented: the floor plan is cruciform; rusticated stone furnishes the appropriate rugged texture to the façade; a pair of imposing twin towers, capped with domes and cupolae, rise more than 100 feet above the street below. However, the two recurring tropes that predominate the most in the design are round arches and dentils: the myriad windows that pepper the exterior are invariably crowned with the former, including the louvered ones in the towers, and the triple entrance facing Yates Street are crowned with a trio of blind arches; while the latter appear in raking rows underneath the parapet gables on both the front and side elevations, undergirding the string course that extends across the façade above the entrance, and within the middle arch of the aforementioned triple entrance. Each gable - front, side and rear - encloses a small rose window of identical size and design, with simple floral tracery and stained glass from the famous Franz Mayer & Co. of Munich. The parish of St. Matthew traces its history back to 1880, an era of stratospheric population growth in the area spurred on by the construction of the New York Central Railroad; the workers who arrived during this time were almost singlehandedly responsible for the urbanization of the parcels north of the tracks; the heart of East Syracuse today. The original church, a wood-frame Stick-style structure, was superseded by the present one in 1917 under the supervision of its then-pastor, Rev. Dennis Moore. Since 2015, St. Matthew's as served as the "hub church" for a community of three "linked" Catholic parishes - the others are St. Francis of Assisi in Bridgeport and St. Mary of the Assumption in Minoa - who nowadays share a pastor and pool resources.
Title: St. Matthew RC Church, East Syracuse, New York - 20210306
Credit: Own work
Author: Andre Carrotflower
Usage Terms: Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0
License: CC BY-SA 4.0
License Link: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0
Attribution Required?: Yes