Tyler Rose, Kilroy's chief financial officer, said the Columbia Square project will initially be funded with a bank line of credit.

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Kilroy said the vacancies are largely in older buildings, while Kilroy is betting entertainment and media companies need more modern office space and that tenants want to work in unique environments like Columbia Square.

WSJ: Hooray for Hollywood! Columbia Square Redevelopment Is Slated

It's the cue for effusive guide Fridjon Thorleifsson to introduce the surrounding Columbia Icefield, a 77-square-mile web of six silvery tentacles between Jasper and Banff, and the largest ice cap south of the Arctic Circle.

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Hanford, which the Department of Energy says is the U.S.'s biggest environmental cleanup site both by size and by cost, occupies 586 square miles of desert along the Columbia River.

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The company owns the most prominent building in Seattle, Columbia Center, a jet-black 1.5-million-square-foot skyscraper that reaches 932 feet.

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Georgette Fleischer, an adjunct English professor at Columbia University who lives in SoHo, said the bicycle station at Petrosino Square near her home blocks an area that has long been used for public art displays.

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In 2008, Lynn Sykes of Columbia University in New York City catalogued all 383 quakes in a 39, 000-square-kilometre area around New York City from 1677 to 2007 and estimated the future risk.

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