Visitors carrying wine glasses filtered into Natalie Amabile’s boutique Sunday, making it one of their stops on the Park Ridge Wine Walk.
Many of them browsed through racks of clothing and contemplated accessories as they made their way to the back of the store, where several fellow members of the Park Ridge Chamber of Commerce were pouring out rose, offering small bites and chatting enthusiastically with those on the Wine Walk.
“It’s a great thing for the community,” said Amabile, owner of Two Sisters S&L Boutique and Brother J’s, 33 S. Prospect, Park Ridge.
“It gets people out and into the store to see what we have — all the fresh stuff for spring.”
The store, which sells men’s and women’s clothing, is named for her two daughters, Ava and Lily, and son Johnny, she said, adding that the store has been in business for eight years.
“We’ve been in this location for three and a half years,” she noted. “Before that, we were in the Soooo Cute location, so eight years total.”
Just down the street, Emily Larson, owner of Raffia Boutique, 13 S. Prospect, was threading cubes of cheese onto toothpicks to fashion small bites for Wine Walk visitors, some of whom were browsing the shop.
“We’re part of the Chamber, and the Wine Walk gets a lot of people out,” she explained. “We do this just to get people familiar with our merchandise.”
Halfway through the afternoon Wine Walk hours, her mother, Sandra Larson, said turnout had been amazing.
“We used to be located on Northwest Highway, and it’s night and day,” she said, referring to customer volume. “People didn’t want to cross at that crazy intersection.”
