Our Lady of Loreto, a Romanesque-style Catholic church, stood at the corner of Sackman and Pacific Streets in Brooklyn for 110 years until 2018, when it was demolished due to extreme disrepair. Today, the consecrated land where it stood now has a rebirth of sorts, as Catholic Charities of Brooklyn and Queens and their partners prepare to construct a $48 million, eight-story, 135-apartment complex to house low income and homeless senior citizens – the Catholic Charities Loreto Apartments.

The project, celebrated at a Thursday ground-breaking, is a partnership with the Dharma Drum Mountain Buddhist community, New York State and Wells Fargo Bank who is the financial partner. Preservationists fought the destruction of the church, built in 1908, but the Diocese of Brooklyn believed the more than $9 million in estimated repairs was no longer a feasible effort.