Warm fall helping Kingston’s Breakwater Park redevelopment

The warm fall weather is making construction a lot easier to handle down at Breakwater Park, and that’s a good thing.

“Due to the outrageously high water levels we’ve experienced, we are playing a lot of catch up this fall,” City of Kingston Manager of Parks Development, Neal Unsworth said.

“We have the shoreline stabilization and beach scale improvement work completed,” he added.

Breakwater Park is undergoing a multimillion-dollar face lift which will include expanded footpaths, a pedestrian bridge and a sandy beach.

Unsworth says it’s one of the largest projects he’s worked on.

“As a landscape architecture project, it’s about 600 or 700 metres in length including the pier. And quite a significant investment into the improvement of a lot of aging infrastructure,” Unsworth said.

However the project will also serve as a memorial of sorts. Back in June, the City of Kingston announced it would rename the Public Utilities Commission dock the ‘Gord Edgar Downie Pier’.

“The waterfront and the environment were important to him as an individual, so I think that’s certainly a great legacy,” Kingston Mayor Bryan Paterson said. “That’s not to say there aren’t other things that we’ll be doing to honour his legacy here in Kingston.”

As for any additional memorials for the late singer, Unsworth says those will be announced closer to the project’s completion, and would also require consultation with the Downie family.