On a Thursday evening in late August, Veterans Memorial Park smells like kettle corn and grilled onions, and the band in the gazebo is tuning up before the Pearl Street Market crowd thins out for dinner. A few blocks over on Riverside Drive, past the Boone Creek bridge, a different kind of transaction is happening inside a horseshoe of ten small wooden buildings that a lot of visitors assume have always been there. They are the McHenry Riverwalk Shoppes, and the people working the counters this month are not just selling barbecue rubs and hand-painted hats. They are trying to prove their business belongs somewhere in this town permanently.
That is the part most passersby miss. The Shoppes were never built as a fixed shopping strip. They are a retail incubator run by the McHenry Area Chamber of Commerce and the City, and every vendor inside is on a clock. Rent is nominal. The space is small, either 12 by 12 feet or 12 by 16. The goal, stated plainly on the city's own site, is for shopkeepers to use the season as a trial run and then graduate into one of the empty storefronts already sitting along Green Street or Riverside Drive. If you're strolling through this fall thinking of it as a cute seasonal market, you're watching something closer to a business school with a river view.
The Buildings Themselves Were a Class Project
Before you get to the vendors, it's worth knowing who built the shops. The tiny shop structures at Miller Point were designed and framed with help from McHenry Community High School District 156 students working alongside Wold Architects, part of a larger volunteer push tied to the city's Miller Point redevelopment. That detail changes how the place reads. This isn't a developer's pop-up concept dropped into a park for foot traffic. It's a homegrown project that put local teenagers' hands on the same buildings where you're now buying soap or a custom cake.
Three Shops Already Made the Jump
The clearest evidence that the audition model works sits about a mile away on Route 120. Three vendors from the original 2023 cohort, Lumber & Twine, Mad Soyentist Candles, and Hair Flextensions, tested their concepts inside the tiny shops and then moved together into a shared storefront at 3430 Route 120. That's the outcome the whole program is built around: use the low-risk season to find out if there's a real customer base, then take the leap into a lease that costs a lot more than a seasonal rental.
Jocelyn Eisenmenger, the Chamber's director of tourism and economic growth, put it simply when this year's group was getting ready to open:
"These are real people who took a chance on their dreams."
That line does a lot of work if you take it literally. Several of the people running the tiny shops this season aren't hobbyists filling weekends. For many of them, according to Eisenmenger, the shop is their only job.
Who's Actually in the Shops Right Now
The 2026 season opened May 1 at Miller Point Park, and this year's roster includes a mix of returning names and new faces:
- Winter Inn BBQ Company, run by David and Rachael Winterling, who are using the storefront to test which of their sauces and rubs customers keep coming back for before committing to the smokehouse restaurant they actually want to open.
- Hello Darling Books & Beyond, owned by Tina Lawrence, now in her second season and experimenting with staying open on Tuesdays, the day new titles hit shelves industry-wide, while she keeps looking for a permanent bookstore location in town.
- Roots & Routes, Scott Smith's laser-engraving business that turns out Chain O' Lakes maps and travel-themed gifts. Smith has said the shop is popular enough that the next step could be hiring staff and opening a warehouse with its own retail space.
- Curated by Laney Boutique, Tawny Haberski's elevated casual clothing shop, also in its second year on Riverside Drive while Haberski keeps an eye out for downtown space that hasn't opened up yet.
- Art for Adrienne, where Lauren Sharp hand-paints and etches one-of-a-kind hats and purses, with plans to host paint-your-own-hat events for customers.
- Nuqi Soaps and Blink Tees, the latter leaning into a Fox River and Chain O' Lakes theme with an outdoor-focused apparel line.
- A cake and pastry vendor known simply by her name, Maniurka, who spent 20 years selling custom cakes and macarons at farmers markets before finally getting a storefront to call her own this season.
Every one of them applied the previous fall, sat through weekly small-business workshops before opening day, and is being evaluated in real time by whoever walks through the door this September.
The Calendar Is Tighter Than It Looks
If you've been treating the market and the tiny shops as one long summer event, the timing is about to split. Pearl Street Market runs Thursdays from 5 to 7:30 p.m. at Veterans Memorial Park, with live music starting at 7 and a rotating food truck each week, but the season ends September 3. That leaves only two Thursdays on the calendar this year, August 27 and September 3, before the gazebo goes quiet until next May.
The Riverwalk Shoppes have more room to breathe. The city has said the village stays open through the end of October, so the vendor lineup above will still be there well after the farmers market wraps for the year. Sandwiched right in between is the McHenry Music Festival, returning to Petersen Park September 10 through 12 with a lineup built across three nights: Shinedown, Daughtry, Sevendust, and Nonpoint headline Thursday, Kane Brown, Kameron Marlowe, Josh Ross, and Zach Miller take Friday, and Hardy closes out Saturday alongside Lakeview and McCoy Moore. Gates open at 3:30 each day.
Put together, the next three weeks are effectively the hinge of the McHenry Riverwalk's fall calendar. The market closes out its season, the tiny shops keep running solo through the fall, and the music festival gives downtown its biggest weekend of the year right after Labor Day.
Why This Matters if You Live Here
None of the vendors above are guaranteed a spot next spring. Each fall, the Chamber opens a new application cycle, and the roster gets rebuilt from scratch, the way it has every year since the shops opened in 2023. Some of this year's shopkeepers will graduate into permanent space the way Lumber & Twine and Mad Soyentist Candles did. Others, like Curated by Laney, are still looking for the right building. A few might not come back at all.
That turnover is the actual point of the place, and it's worth knowing before you write off a trip down to Miller Point as something you've already seen. The person selling you a custom cake or a laser-engraved cutting board this month is, whether they say it out loud or not, deciding whether McHenry is where they build a business for the next decade. Walking through before October gives you a chance to watch that decision play out in real time, which is a different experience than browsing a strip mall that's looked the same for twenty years.
If you're already settled in McHenry and want to talk about what's happening with property along the river corridor, or you know someone weighing a move to a town that's actively reinvesting in its own downtown, Dana Pierson-Emering is always glad to compare notes over coffee, no matter which side of the transaction you're on.
