The Lucy, 619 Grove Street, The Horseshoe, Jersey City, New Jersey

The Lucy has topped out at 619 Grove Street, and a church complex that once sat on New Jersey’s most-endangered list now has a 24-story rental tower rising behind it. SJP Properties, Claremont Development and Battery Global Advisors announced the milestone Oct. 21, 2026, with PCCP as equity partner. Completion is expected in 2028.

Michael Graves Architecture designed the building, Mary Cook Associates is handling interiors and KL Masters Construction Company is the builder.

Project Scope

The tower will hold 444 rental apartments, 13 of them affordable, according to New York YIMBY. The design pairs a glass curtain wall and beveled metal panels with a U-shaped footprint around a rear courtyard. Its boldest move is a triangular cantilever at the southeast corner that overhangs the old church steeple.

Parts of St. Lucy’s Roman Catholic Church, its rectory and its school are being kept. The church doors stay as the main entrance, restored stained glass goes into the lobby, and the iron fence, the tower bell and the façades of two historic walls survive. Preservation work started in September 2025.

The amenity list runs long: a rooftop pool, sky lounge, sundeck and penthouse bar, a fitness center, coworking rooms and a shuttle to PATH. The bell tower gets a speakeasy.

Why It Matters

St. Lucy’s has a hard history. The parish was founded in 1884 to serve Irish immigrants in the Horseshoe section, and the Jeremiah O’Rourke-designed church, finished in 1895, carries a 145-foot bell tower. The parish was closed in 1985. Only the school stayed in use, as an emergency homeless shelter, and Preservation New Jersey put the complex on its 2018 endangered list.

What made the project possible is the order of operations. The team replaced the shelter first, finishing a 165-bed transitional housing facility across the street at 612 Grove Street in 2023, before touching the church site. That’s the part other cities trying to unlock church land should study.

The engineering story is the cantilever. Hanging a corner of a 24-story tower over a 130-year-old masonry steeple leaves no room for error in the transfer structure or in protecting the steeple during construction. With the frame topped out, the hard part of that problem is behind the builder.

Jersey City keeps adding rental towers near Journal Square and downtown. This one gets to say it saved the building it’s standing on.

Project Team & Details