Kingston

Kingston is a historic city in Ontario, Canada, located on the Quebec-Windsor Corridor on the eastern edge of Lake Ontario, where the lake empties into the St. Lawrence River and where the Thousand Islands begin.

The central part of the city is located between the Cataraqui River to the east and the ravine of the small Cataraqui to the west, with areas that extend in both directions. Kingston is the headquarters of Frontenac County. According to the 2001 Canadian census, the population of the urban nucleus was 114,195 inhabitants. Kingston is known as the "Limestone City" (city of limestone) due to its many historical buildings built with this type of local gray stone.

Kingston is approximately halfway between Toronto and Montreal along the three major east-west transportation routes in Central Canada: the San Lorenzo waterway, Ontario's 401 highway (the Macdonald-Cartier Expressway) that flows into on Highway 20 of Quebec, and the Windsor-Québec Corridor of the Canadian Railways. Kingston is also located at the southern end of the Rideau Canal, which was initially built to connect Lake Ontario with the Ottawa River in order to provide a safe transport route to Montreal separated from the US border. Kingston Airport, Kingston Airport / Norman Rogers Airport (CYGK), offers regular flights to Toronto.

Kingston is home to two universities, Queen's University and the Royal Military College of Canada (RMC), as well as St. Lawrence College.             

At Queen's University, one of the oldest radio stations in the world is broadcast, the CFRC.

The base of the Canadian forces of Kingston (CFB Kingston) houses the CFSCE (School of Communications and Electronics of the Canadian Forces).

Kingston Penitentiary (known locally as KP and Kingston Pen) is a former maximum security prison located between King Street West and Lake Ontario. It is know a tourist attraction where tours are offered of the prison.

The economy of Kingston depends to a large extent on institutions and establishments of the public sector. The most important sectors are related to medical care, higher education (Queen's University, Royal Military College of Canada and St. Lawrence College), government (including military and correctional services), tourism and culture. Manufacturing, research and development play a smaller role than in the past. The private sector accounts for half of Kingston's employment. One of the leading industrial employers of Kingston in the 20th century, the Canadian Locomotive Company, closed in 1969, and the old operations of Alcan and DuPont employ far fewer people than in the past. But due to the central location of the city between Toronto, Ottawa, Montreal and Syracuse, New York, a logistics and road transport storage industry has been developed.