Tiny shops under construction for McHenry Riverwalk plans

In 20 or 30 years, McHenry High School students Kyle Lindquist and Brian Blau may show their own children the tiny shops they helped build for McHenry’s Miller Point.

The city of McHenry, the McHenry Area Chamber of Commerce and the RISE Up Foundation also hope that in the future, area entrepreneurs will point to the shops as where they built their first business.

“They will be rented for a season,” said Molly Ostap, the McHenry chamber’s president. “The intent is to give someone an opportunity to test out an idea before going into a brick-and-mortar location.”

By summer 2023, the city plans to install 10 tiny shops as part of the Miller Point master plan. Students and their teacher plan to get the walls built by Thanksgiving break.

Small business owners are invited to rent these shops for the season as a business incubator. If successful in the tiny stores, the hope is tenants would move to retail storefronts in the community.

Carl Vallianatos, an assistant superintendent at McHenry High School District 156, brought the idea to Ostap after he saw the Batavia Boardwalk Shops.

For the last three years, that Kane County town has invited small businesses to lease the tiny shops for their season.

As a chamber board member, Vallianatos knew the city was looking for Miller Point ideas, and as a District 156 official, he knew high school construction students could build the tiny shops. Its drafting students could make the designs and the marketing students its logo.

“It morphed into this huge collaborative project, … the 2.0 plan that is bigger better and more elaborate,” Ostap said.

Over the summer, Lindquist, 18, and Blau, 17, both seniors at McHenry High School, volunteered to help their construction teacher, Dan Rohman, build the first prototype for the tiny shops.

Now, his construction students are learning hands-on, building walls for the two different-sized shops planned. One will be 12-by-12-feet and the other, 12-by-16-feet.

Once the walls are done, the McHenry parks and recreation department will store them and Rohman’s classes will get started on the roofs.

Then in spring 2023, the tiny shops will be placed on foundations at Miller Point. Each building will have electricity and units for heating and cooling the stores.

There were a few bumps along the way during construction, Lindquist and

Blau said. While building the prototype this summer, they determined the shop’s window and door were too close together to allow for electrical boxes, Lindquist said. “We needed to fix that and make the window smaller,” he said.

“It was kind of a stepping stone” of learning the construction trade, Blau said. “If you make a mistake, it is not the end of the world” and you fix it.

The duo and students from other classes sat in on seven or eight meetings with city and chamber representatives during the 2021-22 school year. They also met with teachers, Vallianatos and other volunteers to plan out the shops and a marketing plan.

“It’s pretty cool,” Blau and Lindquist said in unison.

Rohman thought the tiny shops and having construction students build them “was a great idea” when Vallianatos suggested it.

“I didn’t know the scale or the level of this, originally,” Rohman said.

Working on the shops in class changed his teaching plans for the year. “Usually we go slower and are more structured. It is aggressive to start on a project this quick,” he said.

During a recent class, he covered measuring the outside walls and remembering to subtract the thickness of two 2-by-4-inch pieces of lumber to get the inside dimensions

It isn’t just his class that is a part of the tiny shop project. Graphic design students made the project’s logos, and marketing students are working on promotional and other marketing plans.

With proper maintenance and solid foundations, the shops could remain in place for decades, Rohman said.

While area businesses have paid for or supplied lumber, roofing material and other needed supplies, more donations are needed to complete the project, Rohman said.

All proceeds from the RISE Up Foundation’s Splash Into Country concert festival, set for Sept. 16 and Sept. 17 at Petersen Park, will go towards the Miller Point and Riverwalk project, Mayor Wayne Jett said.

The tiny shops are “pretty important” to the park’s overall final plans, Jett said.

Formerly the site of a restaurant that burned down, the tiny shops are the lynchpin of the overall redesign, Jett said. Having the shops there will also help to bring foot traffic to both sides of McHenry’s downtown.

More parking spaces have been added, too, and more are planned. But making the area accessible for people walking, biking, boating or kayaking on the river is part of the overall design, Jett said.

Once opened to the public, the tiny shops will be open beyond summer hours, both Jett and Ostap said.

Tenants must commit to being open Friday, Saturday and Sunday from May through October, Ostap said. Then, they will “transition to a holiday market in November and December and ShamROCKS the Fox in March, for St. Patrick’s Day the following year.”

“It is not quite year-round, but for the majority of the year, it will be the Riverwalk Shops location,” she said.