All I want for Christmas . . .
Can Be Found in Downtown Kenosha

Photography - Mike Gordon

by Heather Larson Poyner

Attention shoppers—Only 44 days until Christmas! Yikes—time to hit the panic button and tear over to the biggest, has-everything-for-everybody-on-my-list store! If we’re really lucky we can collect enough cell phones, slow cookers and credit card debt to keep guilt at bay for another year.

Ah the holidays—that time of year when the best intentions of gift giving can turn children and adults alike into robots set on a manic course to collect trinkets. At its best, holiday gift giving should be the exchange of tokens of our friendship, respect and esteem for one another. Instead we throw ourselves into a frenzied scavenger hunt for stuff to stock next year’s yard sale.

Shopping is also a wearying experience—cavernous fluorescent-lit warehouses with the combined aroma of industrial plastics and fast food pizza. But wait, there’s more: most of your per-dollar spending doesn’t even benefit the town you live in—it goes to the coffers of multi-national corporations.

What if there was a place where several shops offered unique gift choices; some handmade and all sold by independent store owners who might in fact be your neighbors? A place where you could find something special for everyone on your list and break up the day with a bowl of Southwestern tortilla soup, an Italian soda and top flight tabouli or a demonstration of an Australian didjeridu?

That place is Kenosha’s very own Downtown shopping district, where variety is the name of the game. You can hunt for a statue of Ganesh, find a special bottle of wine and sign up for a Zumba class. How about a top hat from Mike Bjorn’s, silver plated candlesticks from Bella Ancora or a ceramics class at Alpaca Arts? Did you say fitness? On Sixth Avenue there’s cardio and muscle building equipment at http://www.anytimefitness.com/en-us/clubs/512/Kenosha-WI-I-health-club and martial arts at Jam Fitness; dance classes for kids of all ages at Laurenzi Dance Studio and Guy Singer Dance Studios; guitar lessons at Jordan’s Music; hand drum lessons at The Drum Hut…And the list—Christmas and otherwise—goes on.

Wait a minute—Downtown Kenosha a shopping Mecca? The same place that once boasted an unused pedestrian mall and dozens of dusty antique stores? Yes, Virginia, it’s true. Downtown Kenosha is rising from its retail ashes. It is also true that for the past three decades Downtown Kenosha has experienced a downturn due largely to the growth of discount malls and big-box retailers in the 1980s.

The disuse of downtown became a vicious circle. As fewer and fewer independent stores could keep their doors open the variety of goods and services plummeted. With nothing to buy, consumers continued to purchase at the malls that had contributed to the demise of the Downtown shopping district.

Yet throughout the exodus to the outlet mall, some of Kenosha’s independent downtown store owners held on. And in the last 10 years there has been growing energy and investment from new small retailers. These recent retail developments have resulted in a renaissance of independent offerings transforming the face of downtown Kenosha into a niche-and-artisan district.

There are still many vacant spaces, but already the downtown Kenosha area offers gift, dining and recreational opportunities to rival most shopping malls and exceed most big-box retailers—from the mainstream to the exotic. In a small distance of 6-10 city blocks we’ve got a spectrum from mainstream to exotic, from copy shops, coffee, wine and eats to Japanese incense and African drums.

A few years ago this article might not have been written—it might have been harder to find a gift for everyone on your list. This holiday season the chances of finding a thought-filled something for your favorite people are very brighter than ever before. As a bonus it’s nice to know that when we give a gift from a downtown business we’re also giving a gift to those independent business owners who are making lives from things they love.