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Nearly two years ago, it seemed that the bold luxury development WB1200 in the Denny Triangle was history. The vision of the dream-big Vancouver, BC–based mixed-use developer Westbank Corp had, by all accounts, melted into the very air dreams are made of. Construction at the complex’s site pretty much ceased. Both its 47-story towers were half-clad in glass. The cranes that sat at the top of them were immobile. Canada’s Globe and Mail reported, in December 2023, that Westbank Corp “[faced an] onslaught of litigation for Canadian, U.S. projects due to unpaid bills.” A year before that report, the Seattle Times sounded the alarm with “Flashy Seattle high-rise planned with a jet on site faces delays, liens.”
In February 2024, I went so far as to predict that the whole project would go the way of the now-world-famous Oceanwide Plaza in Los Angeles—a multibillion-dollar residential and retail project that began in 2015 and bit the dust long before it was completed. More than one billion had already been spent on the downtown project; a little more than that staggering amount was needed to complete it. The developers failed to find anyone with the mind or “animal spirits” to provide the remaining funds for Oceanwide, which is next to the house of King Lebron James, which is next to the Crypto.com Arena. Despite being on some of the most expensive land in the US, it eventually entered a form of oblivion experienced by many of Detroit’s familiar: emptied of any future but too expensive to destroy. From this oblivion emerged LA’s street artists, who, in early 2024, transformed Oceanwide Plaza into the Graffiti Towers, which soon became a tourist attraction. Where money dies, art survives and thrives. Was Denny Triangle’s WB1200 next? And if not art, maybe the city could buy the whole belly-up business for a song and convert it to social housing.
Then, at the end of 2024, I heard from several reliable people who regularly visit a bar in South Lake Union, Pizza Mart, that not only had construction of WB1200 resumed but the rumored swimming pools at the tops of the towers were completed. Six months later, both towers were completely clad in glass. Eight months later, I saw a part of the project’s initial plans emerge: the Boeing 747 jet that’s to fly between the lower floors of the towers. This development came as a complete surprise because one would expect Westbank Corp, having finally secured the needed funding, to cut fat from the project to reach the finish line. Just get the towers done. Fuck transporting the fuselage of a decommissioned United Airlines Boeing 747-400 that was rusting and rotting in some Southern California aircraft boneyard all the way up to Seattle, cleaning it, making it shiny, and fitting it above an atrium at enormous expense. Now, in the time of deep job cuts in the tech industry, Trump’s tariffs and attack on H-1B visas, and growing economic uncertainty, was the time for cool heads to prevail.
Westbank are not holding back, it seems. They’re going all the way. That Boeing 747 is clearly under construction. It will, if completed, provide workspace for, presumably, members of our tech community. (We emailed Westbank’s Seattle office for confirmation on this 747 business, but have yet, not surprisingly, to hear back from them.)
I saw all of this with my own eyes. The structure of the plane is set: the symbol of the giant step Seattle made to its present high standing in global capitalism. The 206 is now one of the richest cities in the world. Its number of millionaires is up there with the global elite. And, in a sense, none of this prosperity would have happened if its domination of the aerospace industry had not overflowed into other sectors. (And the region’s timber industry overflowed, in the early years of the 20th century, into the future of its aerospace industry.) Sure, Boeing is not the social, technological, and cultural powerhouse it used to be, and so, in a way, this jet installation between the towers represents something like the tombstone public art that’s becoming, during the decline of our empire, more and more prevalent.
And so we have, in these times of trouble, a symbol of American greatness in the middle of a tech town whose own future has entered a fog. Westbank, who are very secretive and do their damndest to manage information concerned with their projects (I learned this from several real estate reporters in Vancouver, BC), are completely devoted to an element of WB1200 that, in my estimation, is doomed to become a relic of a relic: a relic of the region’s once-second-to-none plane production sector, and a relic of the tech boom between 2013 and 2022.
When it’s completed, what will Seattle see in this exhumed 747 jet between the long-delayed Denny Triangle towers? That it arrived at the end of the great American Show, which began after the Second World War and without a doubt ended at the start of the present year, ironically under the banner of Make America Great Again? A stretch of history famously celebrated by the city’s Century 21 Exposition in 1962—a celebration of American know-how, commitment to science, to engineering, to rockets, to the world above the clouds, to the endless stars? And all that’s left of this grand national ambition and pride is this office space that, considering the current state of the economy, might end up empty.