Princess Street is a major arterial road in

Kingston, Ontario Kingston is a city in Ontario, Canada, on the northeastern end of Lake Ontario. It is at the beginning of the St. Lawrence River and at the mouth of the Cataraqui River, the south end of the Rideau Canal. Kingston is near the Thousand Islands, ...

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. As the main retail street of downtown Kingston, it is lined by many historic limestone buildings in the city's downtown core. Princess Street begins at Kingston's current western city limits in Westbrook (continuing from Main Street,

Odessa ODESSA is an American codename (from the German language, German: ''Organisation der ehemaligen SS-Angehörigen'', meaning: Organization of Former SS Members) coined in 1946 to cover Ratlines (World War II aftermath), Nazi underground escape-pl ...

) and ends at the downtown waterfront east of Ontario Street. Eastbound traffic is then carried by Ontario Street across the Lasalle Causeway to Barriefield. All of Princess Street and most of Ontario Street formed part of the ''Provincial Highway'' (formerly Highway 2), the main highway from Windsor/

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until the Kingston Bypass segment of

Highway 401 King's Highway 401, commonly referred to as Highway 401 and also known by its official name as the Macdonald–Cartier Freeway or colloquially referred to as the four-oh-one, is a controlled-access 400-series highway in the Canadian prov ...

was opened in 1958. In the outlying western sections of the city, the road was still simply Highway 2, with the Princess Street name gradually adopted as the urban area expanded west.

Overview

The street was originally called Store Street due to a large government store at the lower end. It was renamed Princess Street in honour of the birth of the Princess Royal in approximately 1840. The portion west of Highway 33, originally well outside the city limits, appears on maps as ''York Road'' at least until 1908Illustrated Chronology of the Williamsville Study Area
Jennifer McKendry, City of Kingston, November 2011 and is historically part of the original 1817 Kingston Road from Toronto (which ends in name today in

Ajax Ajax may refer to: Greek mythology and tragedy * Ajax the Great, a Greek mythological hero, son of King Telamon and Periboea * Ajax the Lesser, a Greek mythological hero, son of Oileus, the king of Locris * Ajax (play), ''Ajax'' (play), by the an ...

). An 1839 toll road, one of the first to be

macadam Macadam is a type of road construction pioneered by Scottish engineer John Loudon McAdam , in which crushed stone is placed in shallow, convex layers and compacted thoroughly. A binding layer of stone dust (crushed stone from the original mat ...

ized in the region, retained this same path between Kingston and Napanee; some of this road's stone markers remain visible on the western portion of Princess Street today. A horse-drawn Street Railway had operated on Princess from Concession Street to the foot of downtown from 1877 to 1905; electric

streetcar A tram (also known as a streetcar or trolley in Canada and the United States) is an urban rail transit in which vehicles, whether individual railcars or multiple-unit trains, run on tramway tracks on urban public streets; some include s ...

s replaced this on an abbreviated route (Princess from Alfred Street to downtown) until 1930, when the streetcars were destroyed and the system converted to

buses A bus (contracted from omnibus, with variants multibus, motorbus, autobus, etc.) is a motor vehicle that carries significantly more passengers than an average car or van, but fewer than the average rail transport. It is most commonly used ...

. St. Andrew's Presbyterian Church, founded 1820 and rebuilt in 1889 at Princess and Clergy Street, served as first meeting place of the Board of Trustees of Queen's College (which was granted a Royal Charter in 1841).Chronology of the History of Kingston
, Kingston Historical Society, 2000 (revised) The Commercial Mart Building (Princess and Ontario streets), designed and built in 1817 by architect George Browne, housed the John C. Fox piano factory in 1862, was sold to John Stevenson in 1864 and continued piano manufacturing under different names (Weber, Wormwith, Stevenson) and owners until 1939. A four-storey Kingston limestone structure with archways on the ground floor and a prominent location at the foot of downtown, it has served as an army barracks, a public works building and a store. It is best known locally as the location of the S & R Department Store (1959–2009) and is now divided into retail and office space. The Grand Theatre opened on Princess Street in 1879 as Kingston's Opera House and remains in use today, serving as the home of the Kingston Symphony. From 1942–74, Princess Street intersected with Bath Road and Concession Street at a traffic circle, which was removed and replaced with traffic signals as volumes increased and the circle's capacity was exceeded. The general area is still sometimes referred to as the "traffic circle" by long-time residents. A

shopping centre A shopping center in American English, shopping centre in English in the Commonwealth of Nations, Commonwealth English (see American and British English spelling differences#-re, -er, spelling differences), shopping complex, shopping arcade, ...

constructed just west of the traffic circle in 1955 served as Kingston's largest indoor mall until 1982. The Kingston Centre (1100 Princess Street) went into decline in 1999 after losing key anchor tenant

Sears Sears, Roebuck and Co., commonly known as Sears ( ), is an American chain of department stores and online retailer founded in 1892 by Richard Warren Sears and Alvah Curtis Roebuck and reincorporated in 1906 by Richard Sears and Julius Rosen ...

to rival Cataraqui Town Centre (Princess at Gardiners Road) and was demolished in 2004 to make way for new retail development anchored by Loblaws. Much of the western growth of the suburban area around Kingston in the 1960s and 1970s followed the more southerly Bath Road (Highway 33) from the traffic circle westward into the former Kingston Township; major retailers were

( Kingston Centre, 1100 Princess at Bath), Woolco (Frontenac Mall, Bath Road) and

Kmart Kmart ( ), formerly legally registered as Kmart Corporation, now operated by Transformco, is a department-store chain and online retailer in the United States and Territories of the United States, its territories. It operates four remaining Kma ...

(Bath at Gardiners Road). Highway 2 west of the old Kingston city limits and east of Westbrook/Odessa was largely rural until the early 1980s, with the exception of Sentry Plaza (established January 1962, chain defunct early 1980s, site demolished 2012) at what is now the corner of Princess and Centennial Streets. New suburbs in the city, such as Polson Park (1957) and Calvin Park (1962), were planned and built on what was once farmland south of Highway 33. Subsequent expansion tended to follow Highway 33 westward into what was then Kingston Township. By the 1970s and 1980s, west-end development was being pushed northward (into what is now Bayridge) due to lack of vacant land elsewhere; in 1982, the open rural fields at Princess Street and Gardiners Road (then one block east of old Highway 38, now Midland Avenue) were chosen by Cadillac-Fairview as the location for a major shopping mall, the Cataraqui Centre (945 Gardiners at Princess), which would draw away merchants and commercial activity from the then-existing K-Mart Plaza (defunct, now self-storage) and Frontenac Mall (established 1967, semi- dead mall, kept alive by discount anchors, private practices and public service offices). By the turn of the millennium, the entire length of Princess from Collins Bay Road to downtown Kingston would be filled by commercial development, with only Westbrook village retaining its original rural character. The construction of a stand-alone

Walmart Walmart Inc. (; formerly Wal-Mart Stores, Inc.) is an American multinational retail corporation that operates a chain of hypermarkets (also called supercenters), discount department stores, and grocery stores in the United States and 23 other ...

at Princess and Midland Avenue (replacing the former Woolco at Frontenac Mall) has only hastened the exodus of merchants from the old Bath Road onto outer Princess Street. In the downtown core, Princess Street operates one-way eastbound from Division Street to Ontario Street; westbound traffic is diverted to Queen Street. West of the former traffic circle, Princess Street is a four-lane divided highway until Bayridge Drive, becoming two lanes where it leaves the urban area at Collins Bay Road. A milestone from an 1836 macadam gravel toll road from Kingston to Napanee still stands at the north east corner of Princess and Collins Bay Road.

References

{{coord, 44.23831, N, 76.50493, W, display=title Shopping districts and streets in Canada Transport in Kingston, Ontario Former segments of Ontario Highway 2

Overview

See also

References