This Indiana City is Bursting With New Downtown Boutiques

This Indiana city’s downtown has been growing by leaps and bounds over the past few years which has inspired a growing number of entrepreneurs to open downtown boutiques and take advantage of the increased visitor activity.

Downtown Fort Wayne is well-known for Tin Caps baseball games, fantastic dining options and a bustling night club scene, but it’s quickly adding shopping destination to it’s list of leisure time fun. Whether you are in town for fun, to visit family and friends or for business, make sure that you carve out time to explore their fantastic retail offerings.

I had been wanting to check out the shops for a while so I planned my visit on a recent Saturday. Visit Fort Wayne has a complete list of all of the city’s boutiques and they have the downtown ones listed in their own category that is updated as new ones open up. The list is quite helpful and it had just the right amount of information to get me organized for my trip. The shops are located in a mix of quaint older homes, new developments and in downtown storefronts. I would recommend checking websites and Facebook for days and hours of operation to help plan which order you will visit the boutiques.

Here’s just a sampling of the downtown boutiques I visited. I wasn’t able to visit them all, but the experience of shopping downtown was a nice change of pace from a typical mall day.

There are over 20 shops in the downtown area and more are being added on a regular basis. There’s a great mix of antiques, clothing, gifts, home decor and furniture that can be found throughout the small businesses. Feel free to stop for lunch in one of the downtown restaurants, such as Pint and Slice, and/or make a day of it and hit the Foellinger-Freimann Botanical Conservatory or the Fort Wayne Museum of Art and dinner at Tolon, a local favorite featuring farm-to-table fare.