English: St. Patrick Roman Catholic Church, 304 Main Street, Owego, New York, July 2022. Built in 1890, the design of this handsome red-brick Gothic Revival structure is a fine exemplification of the dominant vertical lines that are intrinsic to the style: windows are tall and narrow and crowned consecutively with pointed arches and decorative keystones; stepped buttresses are ubiquitous; the gabled main façade features raking corbel tables both below its eaves and above the entrance, and is flanked by an imposing 130-foot tower with a slender octagonal spire (left) and spindly conical pinnacle (right). The church's oddly laid out interior features a semicircle of pews surrounding an altar oriented to the side of the building, with a colorful stained glass window as a backsplash. Despite its name, the stretch of Main Street where the church is found consists mostly of handsome 19th-century residences, with most of the village's commercial and institutional buildings found a block south on Front Street. This, combined with the fact that the church retains its original spire - one of the few in Owego to do so - makes it an extremely prominent element of the streetscape. According to available records, there has been a Catholic presence in the village of Owego since at least 1839, mostly Irish in ethnic constitution, whose services were originally held in the home of David Connelly on nearby Paige Street, who converted his second floor to a makeshift chapel. In 1842 Charles Pumpelly, a prominent local businessman and politico, donated part of his large estate to the Bishop John Hughes of the Diocese of New York, of which Owego was then a part, for the building of a proper church. This small wooden structure was superseded by a larger church in 1852, which in turn was razed to make way for the present structure. Since 2003, St. Patrick has been "clustered" with the neighboring Blessed Trinity parish (itself an amalgamation of five formerly independent rural Catholic churches, namely St. James in Waverly, St. John in Newark Valley, St. Margaret Mary in Apalachin, and the since-closed St. Pius X in Van Etten and St. Francis of Assisi in Catatonk), pooling financial resources and sharing the same team of priests; it's expected that in the near future St. Patrick, too, will eventually be folded into Blessed Trinity and cease to be an independent parish.