Richardson Beach
Not really a beach since it's made of limestone shelf-rock. It's located at the foot of Emily Street near the Kingston Yacht Club.
Richardson Beach, also known as "Emily Street", is a favorite location for windsurfers in the Kingston area. Richardson Beach has parking, changerooms (closed), a grassy rigging area, and very enthusiastic boardsailors.
Recent related news
October 31 2011
INTERESTING AGENDA ITEM for the November 1st Council meeting.
City staff is recommending the addition of Pay and Display parking on the west side of Emily Street. This is a prime parking area for Kingston General Hospital patients and visitors. The additional parking spaces will also accommodate waterfront park users, particularly windsurfers at Richardson Beach.
This is great because recent renovations to the Richardson Beach area eliminated some parking, and the west side of Emily street has been a no-parking zone for many years. It looks like this is about to change.
July 15 2011
THE CITY has posted its July 2011 City Priority Matrix.
Here's K7's summary of waterfront-related priorities found in the document.
Of the 86 items in the matrix, only seven concern waterfront.
Just three of those would improve access and two of those are actually being implemented: Lake Ontario Park and Richardson Beach. The third item, the proposed Cataraqui River Trail Project, is citizen-led and still a long way off.
Nothing has changed since the April 2011 Priority matrix except the Richardson Bath House and landscaping work is complete.
Very disappointing overall.
April 4 2011
THE CITY has posted its April 2011 Priority Matrix.
It's not a long document but it's one of those PDFs rotated such that you can't easily read it.
Here's a summary of waterfront related priorities found in the document.
In short, 78 items in the list, seven concern waterfront, but just three would improve access and two of those are actually being implemented: Lake Ontario Park and Richardson Beach.
The third item, the proposed Cataraqui River Trail Project, is citizen-led and a long way off.
VERY slim pickings.
August 5 2010
RFP FOR RICHARDSON BEACH RENOVATIONS (7.3Mb .zip file).
If you find anything in there related to improving swimming at Richardson Beach, do tell.
March 9 2010
SLOW, FRUSTRATING PROGRESS on deferred maintenance at Richardson Beach, in today's Whig.
February 26 2010
CONCEPT PLAN for Richardson Beach and Bath House in Tuesday's Council agenda. It's a 4-page PDF.
October 4 2009
THREE NOTABLE ITEMS on City Council's agenda for the meeting of October 6 2009.
Read the Recreation & Leisure Services Department 2009-2010 Priorities and observe the degree to which waterfront just isn't on the radar. What's waterfront-related is either stalled, or token.
Waterfront items include:
- "Design of the Breakwater beach area (2010)". The Mass Swim, the culmination of public disgust over how our waterfront is marginalized, was held July 22nd 2008.
- "Window repairs at the Richardson Beach Bath house (2010)". That's routine deferred maintenance, long overdue, masquerading as a listable project serving the illusion of serving the waterfront.
- "Final approval to the Lake Ontario Park Plan (November 2009)", the proximity of which signals that public outcry (also here) over the way overblown concept plan will be mostly ignored.
- "Marinas Business Plan (February 2010)" which promises to be an eyeball-roller given all the evident shenanigans (and here) leading to that.
- "Waterfront Plan (2010)", whatever that is. This is bundled with, and listed after items like "New outdoor rinks construction policy (2010)", "healthy food options (2010)", "Community gardens policy (November 200)", and "Sustainable food strategy (2010)". That's your Harvey-Rosen-era Kingston waterfront, right there.
The City gets, gratis, a narrow-strip of adjacent land to allow widening the waterfront pathway between the West Street launch ramp and Simcoe Street. That's courtesy of Holmstead Land Holdings which, rest assured, will get-that-back in spades later.- The 2006 agreement with the Kingston Brewing Company to operate 6 Clarence Street as a service centre for Confederation Basin Marina boaters is renewed and sweetened through 2012.
May 14 2009
A RICHARDSON BEACH UPDATE is on the Council agenda for next Tuesday. 12-pages in all.
The words "windsurf" and "sail", and any reference to current users of the beach, appear exactly zero-times.
So the railroad is running perfectly. How perfectly? The consultant's report is dated April 9th. What's a five-week disclosure delay when you and your plans aren't accountable to anyone in particular?
Oh, and the plan changes drastically. You thought maybe the old plan wasn't windsurfer-friendly? Here's the new (5-week-old) schematic.
This much appears certain: another summer will pass with no beach improvements in Kingston.
January 19 2009
THE LATEST OFFICIAL PLAN for the City of Kingston contains much related to waterfront in its 35 PDF documents and hundreds of pages.
We're fast approaching the plan's "consultation" period, for what that's worth.
Looking through all the documents for its waterfront-related aspects, there are numerous general mentions of the recreational uses of our waterfront. Considering the vast majority of kingstonians have no meaningful relationship with the waterfront beyond the occasional glimpse, it all rings hollow.
The plan goes nowhere beyond cliches and platitudes as far as recreational waterfront is concerned.
For example, in the hundreds of pages of the plan, the words Swim, Sail, Row or Rowing, SCUBA, or Diving never appear. The word Wreck appears several times, always in reference to wrecking yards.
The word Beach appears just once in reference to Richardson Beach Bathouse but not in the context of swimming, its renovation, or any recreational aspect you might hope-for.
Don't look to the plan for mention of Ramps unless those ramps are for sidewalk accessibility.
The word Fishing appears once, in the context of some policy that would control fish farming -- probably text copied wholesale from some other municipality's plan.
The word Boating is used once, in a non-specific way, in one document titled "Downtown and Harbour Area Special Policy Area".
In that PDF you'll find doozies like this:
Public Access to the Water
10A.4.14. Access to the waterfront will be enhanced wherever possible, particularly at the ends of public rights of way. Publicly accessible docks also form character-defining elements of the Harbour Area and provide informal open space that will be preserved.
Oh, there are good things in the plan. Lots of words about linking waterfront pathways, and acquiring waterfront properties. But everybody knows there will never be much money for that.
You can have a multi-faceted plan that makes everybody, especially its authors and the politicians, feel-good. But in the end, when it comes to implementation, there is only one group in Kingston that ALWAYS hoovers most of the money: Downtown Kingston. This plan ensures that this will continue.
The plan is crystal clear on this: the systematic and grotesque annual subsidies of Downtown Kingston, the land owners there, and those who run the related tourist-trappings, will continue unabated.
Looking for quality of life initiatives for the residents of the rest of amalgamated Kingston, especially addressing our waterfront-related recreational infrastructure deficit? Not in the plan.
November 22 2008
THE GROYNE IS A DONE-DEAL, apparently.
Public consultation, Kingston-style: 1) Quickly conjure a single plan with no options, 2) pretend to listen to input, then 3) execute the plan.
Name a recent Kingston waterfront development that didn't follow this pattern, or this pattern minus step-2.
September 20 2008
TWO WATERFRONT-RELATED ITEMS ON THE AGENDA of the City's Arts, Recreation & Community Policies Committee meeting of Thursday September 25th.
- Status Report on the Richardson Beach and bath house enhancements. Beware, the diagrams in this document's exhibits are unreadable. The City Clerk's office actually does work to make the illustrations unreadable, as opposed to simply "Print to PDF" which would give us a perfect copy. Better version here, here, here, and here.
- Mr. Mark Siemons Chair of the Marine Museum Board of Trustees, will speak regarding the consideration for enhanced municipal support for the Marine Museum.
July 26 2008
MASS-SWIM ROUNDUP
-
Lake Ontario Waterkeeper made the Richardson Beach mass swim the main subject of its weekly podcast. (You can subscribe to the Living At the Barricades Podcast via iTunes).
This is interesting: starting at the 27:50 minute mark of the 30-minute podcast, Waterkeeper Mark Mattson urges cities to stop pitching the press about "unknown" sources of E. coli, and get out to the beaches and actually investigate. Co-host Krystyn Tully then suggests how they should be doing that.
Also Lake Ontario Waterkeeper has posted event photos in their new space on Flickr.
The Whig Standard ("dozens of people") and Kingston This Week ("Hundreds take back the beach") both printed reports this week.
Here's the transcript posted by CKWS-TV News on July 23rd.
The mass swim, a wakeup call in support of Richardson Beach, happened last Tuesday, July 22nd.
July 20 2008
RICHARDSON BEACH PRELIMINARY PLANS are posted. So far it's just sketches, no text.
It also appears to be mostly not about the beach, but about landscaping above the beach in the form of pathways and lookouts.
What's with the rock-bounded funnel-shaped groin in the water? The rationale for that will be interesting to hear. Someone should probably ask if the designer has ever been to a beach people actually use for swimming. Note there's no roped-off swimming area, no swimmers, and no windsurfers shown in any of the drawings.
Updated: Mixed reaction from members of on the Kingston Boardsailing Association. Boardsailors are the folks who currently use Richardson Beach the most. Among other points, the current drawings show drastic cuts to the area they need for rigging and laying-out sailboards.
July 19 2008
EDITORIAL AND OP-ED pieces about Richardson Beach in today's Whig.
July 14 2008
GROUP SEEKS BEACH CLEANUP is front-page in The Whig today, about the awareness-raising Mass Swim planned for July 22nd at Richardson Beach.
It's amazing that it has come to this.
The decrepit state of Richardson Beach is plainly evident to anyone who cares to look, and the outcry over our neglected beaches was widely acknowledged in the last municipal election campaign.
October 18 2007
BEACH REPORT 2007 is a 36-page PDF just released by Lake Ontario Waterkeeper.
Seven of the Kingston-area beaches are covered in the report:
- Richardson Beach (they call it "Murney Tower")
- Grass Creek
- Rotary Park, (incorrectly identified as part of "Collins Bay Marina")
- Lemoine Beach
- Arrowhead Beach
- Crerar Beach
- Everitt Beach
- Lake Ontario Park (they call it "Lake Ontario Municipal Beach")
Oddly Big Sandy Bay, one of Lake Ontrario's most beautiful beaches, isn't included.
Many of the observations arise from the abject neglect by our municipality for our beaches.
That's not the only beach-related thing that's neglected by the City.
On August 24th we were pleased to report that FINALLY WE HAVE AN ONLINE BEACH REPORT.
But our fears were well-founded: as it turns out, that online beach report is just another web page the City is unable to properly maintain. There has been no update in the two months since August 24th when the information was first posted.
August 2 2006
On August 1st, Lake Ontario Waterkeeper published a short piece about three local beaches that are presently closed because of E.coli.
Meanwhile, at Richardson Beach, which wasn't closed, on the hottest, muggiest, and smoggiest August 1st in Kingston history, there were very few swimmers, doubtless due to the general confusion over which beaches were, or wern't, safe.
