History

Greek Americans began settling in the Ithaca area in the mid to late 1890s, drawn by the university community of Cornell and by the commercial opportunities of the Finger Lakes city. For decades these early settlers had no church of their own, holding services in the Saint John's Episcopal Church rectory on Saturdays and eventually at a first church space in Collegetown at the former Cosmopolitan Club on Bryant Avenue, a modest arrangement sustained through the dedication of a small community that stretched across the generations.

By the late 1940s and early 1950s the local Greek American community had grown sufficiently to pursue something permanent. After drawing straws, the late Peter Poulos, owner and operator of the beloved Pop's Place in Collegetown, named the new parish in honor of his mother, and Saint Catherine Greek Orthodox Church was born. Initially organized as a mission of the Annunciation Church in Endicott, the community became a fully incorporated parish of the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese in 1964 and received its official church charter in September of 1965, with the City of Ithaca later proclaiming November 25, 2015 as Saint Catherine Greek Orthodox Church Day in recognition of the community's fiftieth anniversary.

The building the parish calls home carries a distinguished history of its own. Designed in the late nineteenth century by William Henry Miller, who had studied under the renowned Cornell University Professor of Architecture Charles Babcock, the building at the northeast corner of Seneca and Geneva Streets in downtown Ithaca was constructed in 1884 for the First Congregational Society of Ithaca. After the Congregational congregation relocated to Cayuga Heights in 1960, Ithaca College used the building for its music and performing arts programs from 1960 to 1966. The Greek American community then purchased the historic property and transformed it into an Orthodox church, retaining the building's original organ and stained glass windows, one of which was donated to the Congregational church by the Treman family in the early twentieth century.

Saint Catherine Greek Orthodox Church at 120 West Seneca Street in Ithaca serves the Orthodox Christian faithful of Tompkins County as a parish of the Metropolis of Detroit within the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America, a welcoming Pan-Orthodox community in the shadow of Cornell University where students, faculty, converts, and families of many backgrounds find a home in the ancient faith.