Beverly Grove church wants to build 19-story apartment tower

Leaders of Beverly Grove’s Our Lady of Mt. Lebanon church announced today that they submitted plans to the city planning’s department seeking to build a 19-story apartment tower on the church’s property.

“This project... will generate revenue that will ensure the future of the Church, while also preserving its cultural history, and at the same time provide new and much-needed housing for our neighborhood,” Bishop A. Elias Zaidan said in the announcement.

The project would create 153 new apartments, 17 of them affordable. New church facilities, including underground parking and an auditorium, would also be added to the site.

The church’s one-acre property is occupied now by a parking lot and four church buildings, including a Spanish Revival-style cathedral built in 1937. Almost all of the cathedral will be disassembled and stored it offsite during construction.

After construction on the apartment building is complete, the cathedral will be put together and rehabbed on the site “with limited modifications,” including wider aisles.

Nadel Architecture and Planning designed the project, with design input from Architectural Resources Group. LRM Landscape Architecture will design the green space.

Our Lady of Mt. Lebanon is a Maronite Catholic church founded in 1923 in Boyle Heights. This branch of the Catholic Church has “cultural ties to the early settlement of Lebanese and other Middle Eastern communities in Los Angeles,” according to a release for the project. Our Lady of Mt. Lebanon has been on this site since 1966.