Princess Street (Kingston, Ontario)

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.

[3] 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).

[8] 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.

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.

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.