St. Charles has almost everything you might expect from an old Fox River town in the Chicago suburbs, although it has assembled those things in a slightly peculiar way.
There is a historic downtown, a newer restaurant district, independent shopping, parks, a theater, a museum, bars, public art and a surprisingly active stretch of river running directly through the middle of town. There are places to launch a kayak, places to fish, several good places to eat outside, and enough trails along the Fox to spend a morning walking without seeing much traffic once you leave Main Street. What St. Charles does not have is a single district large or distinctive enough to account for all of it.
That becomes especially apparent if you know Geneva, only a few miles downstream. Geneva's Third Street gives the town a center that is immediately understandable. The shops continue for blocks through old houses and storefronts, with restaurants mixed among them and quiet residential streets close enough that Melissa and I will sometimes keep walking long after dinner. St. Charles is arranged differently. Main Street carries a great deal of traffic directly through downtown, the Fox splits the commercial area between two banks, and the most interesting businesses are scattered among several small pockets. First Street, the newer development south of Hotel Baker, is attractive but much smaller than photographs suggest. The older blocks west of the hotel are less polished and more idiosyncratic, while the east bank quickly gives way to civic buildings, parks and the river trail.
We have lived close enough to St. Charles for years that none of this usually requires much thought. It is simply a town we use. When our daughters were younger, we were regulars at the St. Charles Public Library. I have launched my kayak from Mt. St. Mary Park and fished below the downtown dam. We have eaten at most of the restaurants around First Street, walked the river in every season when the weather was reasonable, shopped in the older downtown and gone into town simply because we wanted coffee. That familiarity has probably made me less inclined to treat St. Charles as a destination than someone visiting for the first time would, but it has also made clear which parts of town continue to draw us back.
A Saturday Morning on the Fox
Our most common Saturday morning begins at Bosa Donuts, well before there is any reason to think about sightseeing. Bosa is a small independent donut shop in an unremarkable commercial setting near a gas station, and we have been going there for roughly a decade. Weekend mornings can be busy, particularly when families are carrying out boxes by the dozen. Melissa almost invariably gets a glazed donut, while mine is a chocolate Long John. We do not bother with coffee because Arcedium Coffeehouse is only a few minutes away and has been our local coffee stop for about as long.
Arcedium roasts its own beans, which is how I found the place in the first place. The roaster occupies the middle of the shop, with green coffee stored in burlap sacks nearby and usually a dozen or more roasts available to take home. I buy beans there every few weeks. When we stop on Saturday, Melissa generally orders one of the flavored or seasonal drinks, while I tend toward a flat white with a little caramel. There are tables inside, but we usually take the coffee with us because the pedestrian bridge across the Fox is just down the street.
The walk that follows is not especially long or complicated. We cross the pedestrian bridge to the east bank and follow the river south, occasionally detouring through one of the art shows that closes a nearby street. One of those produced a ceramic otter mug from a young Iowa potter that still gets used at home. The river path continues to the Prairie Street bridge, where we cross back to Mt. St. Mary Park and make a loop through the grounds, past the outdoor sculpture and beneath the bridge before following the Fox north again. Eventually we arrive back at the pedestrian bridge and Arcedium. The entire outing takes about an hour unless something along the way slows us down.
What makes the walk worth repeating is largely the river itself. Downtown St. Charles has developed close to the Fox rather than turning its back on it, and there are long stretches where the water remains immediately beside the path. At Mt. St. Mary, the same shoreline used by people walking through the park also serves as a kayak launch. Farther north, anglers work the water around the bridges and the downtown dam, and cyclists use the trail to move through town and beyond it. I know much of this water from a kayak or with a fishing rod in my hand, so I tend to notice current seams, exposed rocks and changing water levels even when we are only out for coffee. Those details are covered more fully in The Fox River Through St. Charles, but they are part of the ordinary downtown landscape here rather than something confined to a park outside town.
Most Saturdays, Melissa and I return to the car after the walk and go home. There are enough other things nearby to keep going, but we usually do not. A donut, coffee and an hour walking beside the Fox is a perfectly good use of St. Charles, and probably the one I would recommend first to someone who wanted to see why we continue spending time here.
Around Downtown
The more conventional downtown begins north of Arcedium, where First Street leads toward Hotel Baker. This is the part of St. Charles that has received much of the newer redevelopment, with restaurants, patios, a parking garage and public space gathered close to the river. There are a few boutiques along the way, including MION, a soap and body-products shop that Melissa visits periodically, and enough places to eat that it is easy to make this the center of lunch or dinner. Alter Brewing is our first choice for lunch. The beer is good, the burgers have been reliable, and the oversized pretzel is exactly what it appears to be. We have eaten at several of the neighboring restaurants as well, with results ranging from good to perfectly ordinary.
First Street is pleasant, particularly when people are eating outside and the riverfront is busy, but its size is worth keeping in perspective. Someone arriving after seeing photographs of the redevelopment could reasonably expect several blocks of shopping and restaurants comparable to Geneva's Third Street. There simply is not that much of it. A visitor can browse the shops, look over the restaurants and walk the public spaces without devoting an afternoon to the effort. Hotel Baker, which sits at the north end near Main Street and the river, is more or less where this newer piece of downtown gives way to the older one.
The blocks west of Hotel Baker are less tidy but more interesting to me. Bars and restaurants are mixed with boutiques, jewelry stores, a homebrewing supply shop and a handful of businesses that would be difficult to fit into any deliberate downtown theme. Ghoulish Mortals is the most distinctive. Our older daughter likes it, and we have been through the store many times looking at the shifting collection of horror merchandise, skulls, Dungeons & Dragons dice, movie shirts, patches, stickers, 3D-printed creatures and other things that fall somewhere between goth shop, horror store and general repository for peculiar objects. Antique Market I is nearby, with small dealer spaces full of furniture, collectibles and the unpredictable accumulation that makes a small antique market worth browsing even when you are not looking for anything.
North of Hotel Baker, Dick Pond Athletics and Salerno's on the Fox are both comfortably walkable from the central blocks. Dick Pond is a regional specialty running store, the sort of place that gives someone with an actual reason to shop for running shoes or gear a reason to keep walking. Salerno's is the stronger destination if dinner outside is the objective. We passed it for years without eating there, which our daughter attributes to the exterior looking "sketchy." The river side of the building bears little resemblance to that first impression. The patio sits directly beside the Fox at roughly river level, with an open view back toward the dam. It is casual, family-oriented, and has a broad enough menu to work for a group.
The Fox remains visible from much of downtown, but Main Street bridge is where I usually stop to look at it. The low-head dam sits immediately downstream, and there is often a fisherman working the water below it. Stairs beside the civic building provide a closer view, although the dam deserves the same caution as any other low-head structure despite being surrounded by buildings, paths and people. Across the bridge, the commercial area becomes sparse fairly quickly. The Office and the St. Charles History Museum sit on this side of downtown, while farther north the riverfront opens into Pottawatomie Park, with trails, recreation facilities and the paddlewheel boats that have been operating on this part of the Fox in one form or another for years.
Pottawatomie is worth adding when more time outside sounds better than more shopping. It does not lead into another commercial neighborhood, and there is little reason to continue north expecting one. This part of St. Charles is parkland, river and trail, which is consistent with the way the east bank feels through much of downtown. The city has put commercial activity on both sides of the Fox, but the balance is uneven. Most of the restaurants, bars and shops that interest us are west of the river; the east side becomes recreational and civic much sooner.
Dinner and the Evening
For an ordinary dinner downtown, we most often gravitate toward the First Street area. La Mesa has been the most dependable choice for us, a Mexican restaurant we have visited enough times that recommending it does not require much qualification. Alter Brewing also works if beer and a burger are more appealing than a conventional dinner, while Salerno's makes more sense when the weather is good and eating beside the Fox is worth walking several additional blocks. Whiskey Bend, in the older downtown, has an enormous whiskey selection and a solid burger. There are plenty of other restaurants within a few blocks, including several we have tried and found merely fine, which is probably more useful to acknowledge than to manufacture a long list of recommendations.
The Graceful Ordinary is the more polished choice. Melissa and I finally ate there after passing it for years, and it was excellent, with a beautifully appointed room, exceptional service and food that justified the step up from a casual dinner. Melissa's gnocchi was among the best she has had, and my shrimp pasta was good enough that I was still using bread to get the last of the sauce. It is better suited to a date night or dinner with friends than a family meal, and while it is more expensive than our usual St. Charles stops, it did not feel exorbitant. The only caution is that the menu on our visit leaned heavily toward fish and seafood.
After dinner, the limits of downtown St. Charles become more noticeable. We may walk through First Street, get frozen yogurt, or head toward Ghoulish Mortals if our daughter is with us, but there is not enough continuous downtown to support the kind of long, unplanned evening walk we routinely make in Geneva. That does not matter much if there is somewhere else to go. The Arcada Theatre sits on Main Street within easy walking distance of the restaurants, and a show there would pair naturally with dinner and perhaps a cocktail at The Office before or afterward. The older downtown also has a row of bars for anyone interested in staying out later, although I have spent little enough time inside most of them that I cannot offer much useful distinction among them.
If Melissa and I want a long dinner followed by an equally long walk through attractive streets, we are still more likely to choose Geneva. If the evening has another purpose, whether a show, drinks, dinner beside the river or simply being somewhere closer to home, St. Charles works well.
St. Charles on Its Own Terms
St. Charles is difficult to reduce to the usual river-town description because so much of the city exists outside the charming part. Drive east or west from downtown and it quickly becomes a large Chicago suburb, with strip centers, major retailers and busy roads. Even within the old center, the river, Main Street and several generations of development have left the interesting places scattered rather than arranged along one obvious corridor. A first visit confined to First Street could therefore be pleasant but surprisingly brief, while a search for St. Charles restaurants or shops can easily send someone miles away from the part of town they intended to explore.
The older we get, the more I appreciate the fact that St. Charles is useful in addition to being attractive in places. We have family history at the library, Saturday mornings at Bosa and Arcedium, dinners around First Street, walks through Mt. St. Mary, and years of fishing and kayaking on the Fox. Ghoulish Mortals is in the rotation because our daughter likes it. Salerno's turned out to be far better from the river side than its street-facing exterior suggested. The Graceful Ordinary gave us one of the better dinners we have had in town. Some restaurants have been excellent, some good, and some have given us no particular reason to return.
None of that adds up to a tidy identity for the town. I am not sure one is necessary.
Many of our best mornings in St. Charles have lasted little more than an hour, ending back at the car with empty coffee cups after another loop around the river.