He built twenty-two gas stations that opened the door into commercial real estate projects with McDonald’s, Walgreens and other corporations. In the late 1990s Lakha was one of the biggest independent Chevron dealers in America. The Avenue Bellevue project will be completed in the summer of 2023. In August of last year, an Avenue Bellevue condo penthouse under construction sold for just over eight million, a record for the Pacific Northwest, according to the Puget Sound Business Journal. Lakha broke ground in 2020 for Avenue Bellevue, a high-end condo-retail-hotel development in the city’s downtown. It took some digging, but I learned that Lakha is now principal and CEO of Fortress Development, a $1.1 billion commercial real estate firm in Bellevue, Washington, ten miles outside of Seattle. Social media posts said he had “vanished.” In recent months I wondered what happened to him. Lakha’s story is an important celebration of a New America. Miller had left his job as a vice president at Leo Burnett Worldwide in Chicago. When he sold Biddy’s he mentored new owner Mike Miller (no relation to the Delilah’s owner of the same name) who had never run a music venue. He was a young immigrant from Pakistan who owned a blues-and-rock club with an Irish name in predominantly Jewish Rogers Park.
