Drive south out of Buffalo on Route 5 and the first thing you see isn't the lake. It's a dome, 80 feet across, with four copper angels standing 18 feet tall on top of it, blowing trumpets at the four points of the compass. Under that dome is a church that cost $3.2 million in 1925 dollars and opened without a nickel of debt on it. The man who paid for it started out selling feed and grain, and his best fundraising idea was a mailing list.
Nelson Baker wrote to every postmaster he could find
Baker enlisted in the 74th New York State Militia in July 1863, at 21, for a thirty-day term. When he got out he went into the feed-and-grain business in Buffalo with a fellow veteran, Joseph Meyer, and did well at it. Then he left it for the seminary, which is not the usual direction of travel.
He was assigned to the struggling parish at Limestone Hill, south of the city, and inherited about $60,000 in debt. His solution was direct mail before anyone called it that. He founded the Association of Our Lady of Victory, wrote to postmasters across the country asking for the names of Catholic women in their towns, and offered membership for 25 cents a year. Enough quarters came back that the debt was gone by 1889, and they kept coming back for the next forty-odd years.
Local accounts also credit him with a stroke of luck he treated as something else. In 1891, short of fuel money, he hired drillers to look for natural gas on church land and, the story goes, buried a statue of Our Lady of Victory at the spot he wanted them to dig. They hit gas past 1,300 feet. Take the statue part as the legend it is; the well was real, and it heated his buildings for decades.
By then there were a lot of buildings. Baker ran an infant home, an orphanage, a protectory for older boys, and, from 1919, a maternity hospital. The church came last, on purpose.
Four years and more than forty kinds of marble
Fire damaged the old St. Patrick's church in 1916. The last Mass there was said in May 1921, and the cornerstone of its replacement was blessed that August by Bishop William Turner. Baker hired Emile Ulrich, a Cleveland architect, and told him not to economize.
Ulrich didn't. The exterior is white marble from the Georgia Marble Company. The interior uses more than forty different types of Italian marble, and the Stations of the Cross (fifteen of them, nearly life-sized) were each carved in Italy from a single block of Carrara. Two hundred stained-glass windows were made locally, at Otto Andrle's studio in Buffalo. The dome's interior mural gives its angels the faces of actual babies from Baker's infant home.
Angels are the running theme, and nobody has ever finished counting them. Baker's own line was "There are a thousand angels in the Basilica!" The shrine's current estimate runs somewhere between 1,500 and 2,500, depending on how small a carved face you're willing to count.
The sanctuary was finished in late 1925. The first Mass was said on Christmas Day that year, and the building was consecrated on May 25, 1926, paid in full. At completion it was widely reported to have the second-largest dome in the United States after the Capitol.
Two months later, Rome upgraded it
In July 1926, roughly two months after the consecration, Pope Pius XI designated the shrine a Minor Basilica by apostolic decree. Accounts at the time called it the second basilica in the country. Not bad for a parish that had been in the hole for $60,000 inside of a lifetime.
Lightning took the rest. The original towers were open marble, 165 feet, and in 1941 a strike damaged them badly enough that they were rebuilt shorter, enclosed, and capped with copper domes. That's the silhouette you see today. The towers on the postcards from the 1930s are taller.
The building that outlasted the payroll
Timing is the part people miss. The basilica went up in the 1920s in a city that existed because of a steel plant, in the same years Bethlehem Steel was taking over the works on the lakefront and pouring money into them. A lot of the quarters in Baker's mail came from households whose paycheck came from the mill. When steelmaking ended in the 1980s and the payroll went away, the church did not. Neither did the charities attached to it, which still serve thousands of children and families in Western New York every year.
Baker died on July 29, 1936, at 94. Pope Benedict XVI declared him Venerable on January 14, 2011, the step before beatification. His remains are interred inside the building he raised the money for, one quarter at a time.
Wear it
The dome and the two copper-capped towers are the most recognizable skyline in Erie County outside downtown Buffalo, and they belong on a shirt. Our Our Lady of Victory Basilica tee is part of the ALL America City collection, one real Western New York landmark per shirt, no filler. Lackawanna has two more in the lineup: the mill that built the town, and Steel Winds, the turbines standing on what the mill left behind. For the rest of the region, start with the full town-by-town guide.