McHenry's Riverwalk Shoppes Are Temporary by Design, and That's What Makes This Fall Worth Watching

Cantaritto's Tequila Bar & Grill took five years to open. Flavio Munoz bought the old smoking accessory shop on Green Street back in 2021 with a plan to bring authentic Mexican food to McHenry, and after years of construction, a city facade grant, and a scramble to hire staff in the final weeks, he and his wife Alma Garcia finally opened the doors on the Fourth of July this year, complete with a tabletop spit for their al pastor tacos.

A few blocks away, at Miller Point Park, Tawny Haberski just wrapped her second season inside a 12-by-16-foot wooden shed. This year she added a jeans rack and a curtained dressing room, a small upgrade to a shop she knows will close for the winter and might not reopen in the same spot next spring. Two very different clocks are running through downtown McHenry right now, and the gap between them says more about where this town is headed than any single grand opening does.

The Shop That's Built to Leave

The McHenry Riverwalk Shoppes sit along Boone Creek at Miller Point Park, a cluster of small wood-frame storefronts run by the McHenry Area Chamber of Commerce. Rent is nominal, but the tradeoff is structure: tenants commit to a single season, attend workshops on running a small business, and get paired with mentors, all built around one stated goal, helping shop owners test a concept before they sink real money into a permanent lease downtown. The 2026 season's ten tenants opened for business on May 1, and the mix says a lot about who actually applies for this kind of tryout.

Jennifer Maniurka, known locally as the Cake Lady of Spring Grove, spent two decades baking out of a commercial kitchen in Johnsburg before finally landing her own storefront this year. Kelly and Scott Smith of Roots & Routes, a Woodstock couple, sell laser-cut wood maps of the Chain O'Lakes, detailed enough to include actual lake depths, and are now weighing whether the shop justifies a jump to a warehouse with a retail front. Haberski's Curated by Laney Boutique and Tina Lawrence's Hello Darling Books & Beyond are both back for a second year, and both owners have said outright that a permanent Green Street address hasn't turned up yet, but they're still looking.

None of these tenants signed up to stay at Miller Point Park forever. The shed is the audition, not the show.

What It Looks Like When the Bet Pays Off

While the Shoppes run on an eight-month clock, the buildings around them are proving what happens when an owner clears the audition and commits for real. Cantaritto's took five years and a $10,000 city facade grant awarded back in 2023 to finally open its doors this July. Above the tavern next door, Courthouse Prime opened in February inside the second floor of a building that started life as McHenry's courthouse in 1838 and had sat as storage space for years before someone decided a historic staircase and a prime cut of beef belonged together.

Over on Route 120, a building that had stood empty since Applebee's closed finally reopened in May as Yummy Bowl Mongolian Stir-Fry and Sushi, after months of renovation to a roof and interior that had been neglected during the vacancy. And Leona's Pizzeria, which opened at 3102 Route 120 in the summer of 2025, brought Chicago-style deep dish and thin crust into a stretch of road that had gone quiet.

None of these four are Riverwalk Shoppes graduates. But they're proof of the same appetite the incubator is trying to cultivate, owners willing to put years and real capital into a McHenry address rather than treating it as a stopover. That two systems, one built for quick experiments and one built for permanent square footage, are both active in the same twelve months isn't a coincidence. It's what a downtown actually filling back in looks like from the inside, as opposed to what it looks like from a single ribbon cutting.

This Fall's Calendar, Read as One Story

Once you see the two clocks, the fall calendar stops reading like a list of unrelated things to do and starts reading like the connective tissue between them.

The Foxtober Fall Festival on October 17 is functionally this season's demo day, the last big weekend to walk the shoppes before the sheds close up for winter. This year the chamber added a wrinkle: a $40 Mystery Bag stuffed with over $100 worth of products from across the shoppes, capped at 100 bags, that went on sale August 1 with an explicit warning it would sell out fast. That's a small but telling detail. A retail incubator confident enough to run a limited-drop promotion is one that believes its current tenants have real product people want, not just a novelty of shopping in a tiny building by the creek.

The Holiday Market that follows in November and December is the incubator's actual closing bell for the year, four Saturdays of German-style outdoor shopping before the shoppes go dark until next May. And the Thursday night Pearl Street Market at Veteran's Memorial Park, food trucks and acoustic sets after the farmers market wraps, is worth pairing with a dinner reservation at one of the new Green Street spots. Walk the market, then sit down at Cantaritto's or upstairs at Courthouse Prime. It's a genuinely different Thursday than downtown McHenry offered two years ago.

What This Means If You Live Here

The easy version of this story is a list: new restaurant, new shops, a fall festival, go check them out. That version is accurate and it's also everywhere already.

The more useful version is this: the Riverwalk Shoppes were never meant to be the destination. They're a scouting mechanism, and this fall is your best chance to see this year's applicants before the season closes and some of them either disappear or resurface with a real lease somewhere on Green Street. If you want an actual read on where downtown McHenry is headed, don't just watch which shops open at Foxtober. Watch which names from this year's ten show up with a permanent address next spring. That's the tell nobody puts on a ribbon-cutting banner, and it's a better indicator of momentum than any single opening, including the ones that already landed this year.

If you're the kind of person who tracks a town by its Thursday nights and its new tenant announcements, McHenry is worth that kind of attention right now. And if this is the season you start wondering what it would mean to actually live closer to Boone Creek instead of just visiting it for pizza and pumpkin carving, that's a conversation I'd genuinely enjoy having.

Melanie Enriquez, Sells The Burbs works with buyers and sellers across McHenry County who want a guide who already knows which storefronts are worth watching. Let's Connect.