I am writing to record a professional difficulty.

This desk has held a standing obituary for the building at 111 Westminster Street since 2013. It has been revised twelve times. It has never run. I am printing it unrun, with the revisions stripped out, because the alternative is revising it a thirteenth time in October and I have decided I would rather be seen to have failed than to keep looking busy.

The facts are not in dispute and I have never needed to change them.

Twenty-six storeys. Four hundred and twenty-eight feet, which is still the tallest anything has been in this state. Limestone over a steel frame. Finished in 1928 by Walker and Gillette, on ground cleared by knocking down the Butler Exchange three years earlier, which nobody has held against it. The nickname first appears in print in 1978 and everybody has a different story about where it came from and all of the stories are wrong in the same direction.

Empty since 2013, when the bank walked out.

That is thirteen years, which in my line is a long time to stand next to something.

I want to explain the difficulty precisely, because from the street it looks like impatience and it is not.

I do not collect buildings that are empty. Empty is a condition, not an outcome. I collect at the point where a thing stops being able to become anything else, and this building has never once reached that point, because every year somebody arrives with a plan and the plan is real. Not a gesture. Real money, publicly voted. A tax agreement with the city worth about twenty-nine million over thirty years, if it is completed. A rewrite of a state credit programme to release four and a half million more. Something close to sixty million in public support altogether, assembled by people who meant it.

Three hundred apartments, a fifth of them below market, shops on the ground floor. That is the plan. It is a good plan. It has been the plan since 2022.

There is no construction timeline. There is no completion date.

So I cannot take it. It is not finished and it is not becoming. It is held exactly at the moment before, permanently, and the moment before is the one moment I have no claim on.

Meanwhile the assessment came in at thirteen and a half million, down half a million on the year, and I want you to sit with that. The building is worth less than it was and the plan is further along than it was. Both. There is no reading of that I can file.

And I have to record the part I like least.

The man who bought it in 2008 and spent seventeen years trying to bring it back is gone. He was seventy. That one I could do, and I did it, and it took an afternoon.

I took the man and I did not take the building. He was the thing that was alive in this and the building is the thing that is not, and I got them in the wrong order, and there is no procedure for that.

I have been asked whether I hold a grudge against the property. I do not. It has done nothing. It is limestone.

I am simply reporting that I have stood on Westminster Street for thirteen years with the paperwork ready, in front of a thing that will not die and will not open, and that this is the only assignment I have ever had where I have come to hope I am wasting my time.

Hundreds of lighted windows, is what they say it will be.

I would like that. I would like to be wrong here more than I have wanted to be wrong anywhere. If the windows come on I will tear this up in front of witnesses and file nothing, and it will be the best thing this desk has ever not produced.

Until then it sits in standing type, and so do I.

Obituaries appear monthly. This one does not count.