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Construction finally starts on 41-story Potala Tower in Seattle

It's been more than seven months since an unforgettable ground-breaking ceremony with chanting monks, and construction of the 41-story luxury apartment/hotel project in downtown Seattle is finally starting, the general contractor, PCL Construction, said Tuesday.

The Bellevue developer, Lonsang Dargey, a former monk from rural Tibet orchestrated the late-August groundbreaking, where the monks prayed and chanted in a transmission repair shop. Actor Tom Skerritt, a friend of Dargey, and Mayor Ed Murray attended the ceremony.

The old transmission shop, 2116 Fourth Ave., was demolished not long after the ceremony, but since then nothing much appears to have happened until recently when PCL put up construction barriers on the site that's just north of the Cinerema movie theater.

Last month, Dargey Development Sam Kanner told the Business Journal his company and the project team were finalizing the details of the development that will require a mass excavation for seven levels of underground parking.

The cost of the project, which is scheduled to be done in the summer of 2017, is $190 million. Money from overseas is helping finance the development. Path America raises funds from foreign nationals through a federal foreign investment program called EB-5. In exchange for investing in projects and businesses that create U.S. jobs, investors get green cards.

Potala Tower, which Seattle architecture firm Weber Thompson designed, is named for a 7th-century Tibetan palace. It will be "a modern sanctuary" with 142 hotel rooms and approximately 340 apartment units, according to a PCL press release. Hotel Indigo will operate the hotel whose lobby will have a restaurant that will feature "a prominent local chef," the release states.

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http://www.bizjournals.com/seattle/b...ry-potala.html