🌊 Inside Buffalo’s Muslim Transformation

How immigration is remaking Buffalo’s hoods, and turning churches into mosques

Buffalo, NY

It was 1992 when the Holy Mother of the Rosary Cathedral on Sobieski Street took its new name, “Masjid Zakariya.” The parallel street was also rebranded to “Medina Ave,” although locals still call it “Sweet.”

Masjid Zakariya, formerly Holy Mother of the Rosary Cathedral

The conversion of a neglected, formerly Polish street in East Buffalo to a Muslim one seemed like a small event. Three decades later, though, it stands as a monument to a much bigger shift: East Buffalo, once the second-largest Polish-American community in the United States, has been remade. Sunday mass has given way to Friday prayers, with attendees from Bangladesh, Myanmar, Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia. The neighborhood parents tell stories of refugee camps, not steel plants.

And in the process, Buffalo’s notorious East Side has prospered. From being one of America’s most dangerous neighborhoods, it’s now a place where kids play outside, couples take walks together, and families congregate in public places.

East Buffalo went from Polish to dangerous to something else entirely. We went to find out how.

To understand the East Side today, you have to understand what it used to be.

A home in what used to be one of the US’ most dangerous neighborhoods.

For roughly a century, the area around Broadway and Fillmore was Polonia – a dense grid of Catholic parishes, worker cottages, and ornate immigrant churches that anchored one of the largest Polish enclaves in America. It grew on the back of Buffalo’s steel and grain industries. Then those industries collapsed.

Deindustrialization in the late 20th century gutted the neighborhood. The Polish families who could afford to leave moved to the eastern suburbs, leaving behind houses to a new wave of black residents who had migrated north after World War II. By the late 20th century, much of East Buffalo was a landscape of vacant lots, boarded windows, and crumbling churches.

A Buffalo home decorated with Bills flags

The neighborhood’s rampant violence made Buffalo one of the country’s most dangerous cities. Locals told us that they would not go outside for fear of a drive-by.

Years of politicians promising to fix it made no difference. Then came the Muslims.