Lack of riverside patios a missed opportunity

It always pays to venture outside of one’s hometown to see how other urban areas work. There’s nothing better than comparing, contrasting and reflecting on what we do well and where we need improvement.

Spending a few days in Kingston this summer was illuminating in several ways. While I have visited the city many times, I had never made a point of staying for a few days to really get a sense of how the city organizes itself.

If you have been there, you know the harbourfront is gorgeous, fashioned by limestone, sailboats, olden times, and tourism. This is a happenstance of geography and history in the former capital of Canada, and so cannot be replicated.

Patio life is everywhere in Kingston, whether overlooking the water or in the bustling downtown. Trendy cafes, family restaurants, breakfast nooks resplendent with foliage – all of them busy with the hum of urban life.

But even allowing for scale differences (Kingston being about five times larger than Lindsay) does not explain the utter famine of comparable riverside patio life here in town.

Here we are, nearly halfway through another summer, and the only place to grab a beer remotely close to the river is the local legion — and I’m not going to count it because it’s not accessible for everyone. This is an urban planning scandal for a town located in the Kawartha Region. You can bet many newcomers here are thinking the same thing, let alone those of us who have called it home for years. It is a failure of will and imagination of successive councils.

We have a dynamite looking downtown now (with a missed opportunity to have made it more pedestrian-friendly), with beautiful wide sidewalks, amazing shops, and one great patio on Kent Street, at the Olympia Restaurant. On Cambridge Street, the Pie Eyed Monk has worked hard to energize patio life. Further down the same street, Needful Things is trying to do some innovative things to create a culture of inside-meets-outside. Kindred Café is a hot spot in the downtown core and yet it doesn’t have a green light to pull off a bigger patio, owing to municipal rules.

If we are going to become a rural-meets-urban kind of destination, then the rules need to change, and the urban part of our town needs a lot more cultivation and definition. Our boardwalk is delightful, and our freshly revamped Rotary trail is welcome. But where are the eateries and cafes with outdoor options that bring people together and help forge a sense of community?

We also need people living in our downtown – the entrepreneurs, the families, and the dreamers. And yet to get that we are fighting against a prevailing and reflexive North American tendency toward home ownership as the Holy Grail of how to live. But that’s another column.