Ask most people in Kingston where to walk along the river and they'll tell you to cross the Market Street Bridge into Kirby Park. That's the postcard answer. It's also incomplete.
Kirby Park belongs to Wilkes-Barre. The bridge that gets you there is beautiful, and the park itself has earned its reputation. But the Luzerne County Levee Trail runs through Kingston's own riverfront first, past a park most residents drive past without stopping: Nesbitt Park, with a boat ramp, fishing access, and disc golf, sitting on the Kingston side of the water the entire time.
Two Parks, Two Sides of the River
The Levee Trail is a 12-mile system built on flood-control levees raised after Tropical Storm Agnes pushed the Susquehanna to 40 feet and flooded 48 square miles of the valley in 1972. It runs through four connected sections across Wilkes-Barre, Hanover Township, Plymouth, Edwardsville, Kingston, Wyoming, and Forty Fort. The trail groups list Kirby Park and Nesbitt Park as separate, parallel access points, one in each town, not one trail leading to a single destination.
That distinction matters more than it sounds like it should. Kirby Park is the one with the name recognition. It's a 52-acre Olmsted-designed green space with tennis courts, two playgrounds, and the city's annual Cherry Blossom Festival. It's also where Wilkes-Barre holds its Fourth of July concert and fireworks. None of that is on the Kingston side of the river, so residents who default to "cross the bridge" are walking past their own park to get to someone else's.
Nesbitt Park doesn't get the same billing, but it doesn't need the bridge either. Heading south along the trail into Kingston, you pass under the North Street Bridge and reach a spur that leads directly into Nesbitt, which has its own boat ramp, fishing access, and a disc golf course built into the riverside grounds. This past August, Nesbitt hosted RiverFest, pulling boaters and anglers to the same stretch of water that's a five-minute walk from most of downtown Kingston. No bridge, no border crossing, no detour into another town's park system to use it.
The Trailhead Most Residents Drive Past
If Nesbitt Park is the destination locals skip, the Third Avenue trailhead is the entrance they skip too. The Susquehanna Greenway lists dedicated trailhead parking at the intersection of Third Avenue and the Cross Valley Expressway in Kingston, a direct entry point onto the levee that doesn't route through Kirby Park or require the bridge at all. It's the kind of access point that only shows up on a greenway map, not on a mental map built from habit.
For a resident deciding between a five-minute drive to Third Avenue and a ten-minute walk that ends in a bridge crossing, the math changes what "going to the river" actually means day to day. It's not one route with one endpoint. It's a network with entrances on both sides of the water, and the Kingston side has more of its own footing than the postcard version suggests.
When the Bridge Is Actually Worth Crossing
None of this makes the Market Street Bridge irrelevant. It's a genuine landmark: 1,400 feet of early-1900s span connecting Wilkes-Barre and Kingston, with massive stone pylons on each end topped by eagle statues weighing roughly 5,500 pounds apiece, dedicated to the region's World War I veterans. Walk it at sunset and you'll understand why it shows up in nearly every photo taken of the valley from the water.
The bridge is also the right call when the destination is genuinely on the other side. This Sunday, September 27, the Greater Northeast PA Out of the Darkness Walk fills the Kirby Park side of the river starting at 11 a.m., part of the national suicide prevention awareness effort. It's exactly the kind of event that justifies crossing over: a specific reason, on a specific day, to treat the bridge as the front door rather than the only door.
That's the actual pattern worth knowing. Some destinations require the crossing. Most of the daily-use riverfront, the fishing, the disc golf, the boat ramp, the flat paved miles for a Tuesday evening walk, doesn't.
The Trail Changes Fast From Here
Late September is close to peak color along the levee, and the paved surface makes it one of the easier places in the valley to catch fall foliage without committing to a hiking trail. That window is short. The same stretch of levee that carries walkers and cyclists through October turns into one of the region's informal sledding hills once real snow shows up, a seasonal flip that longtime users treat as routine and newcomers usually discover by accident.
Knowing that shift is coming changes how you use the next few weeks. A walk from the Third Avenue trailhead down through Nesbitt Park right now gets you color on the water and open pavement. Wait until January and the same stretch becomes something else entirely.
What This Actually Says About Kingston
The easy story about Kingston's riverfront is that the good park is across the bridge. The more accurate one is that Kingston has its own frontage on the same river, with its own park, its own boat ramp, and its own direct trailhead, and none of it requires leaving town. The bridge is a choice, not a requirement, and knowing the difference is the kind of local knowledge that only comes from actually walking the levee instead of assuming where it leads.
If you're already living here, that's worth testing for yourself this week, before the color turns and the season shifts again. And if you're weighing a move into Kingston or a neighboring borough and want a read on what daily life actually looks like block by block, Luxe Homes Real Estate knows this stretch of the valley from the ground up, not from a map.
