Five more reasons to be proud Hastings is home

Drive down Vermillion Street this month and the block between 13th and 18th feels different than it did a year ago. Sushi boats go by the window at a restaurant that wasn't there. A hearing care office has doubled its footprint. A burger joint that used to operate out of an American Legion kitchen in St. Paul Park now has its own dining room. And the corner that sat burned and boarded for three years, the one everybody in Hastings has a story about, is just dirt.

That last part matters more than it looks like it should.

What's actually new

Five storefronts have opened or expanded along the Vermillion Street corridor and downtown in the past several months, and each one has its own story worth knowing if you haven't stopped in yet:

• Hasu Japanese Restaurant, 1309 Vermillion St, run by owner Li Ta, who spent nine months building out the space down to individually placed wood slats on the dining room walls. Ta held his official Chamber ribbon cutting in early June, three months after quietly opening. Asked where the design sense came from after years working in other Japanese restaurants, his answer was short: "Instinct, right? Just instinct."
• 328 Grill, now at 350 33rd St W, which closed its kitchen operations inside the St. Paul Park American Legion Post 98 and relaunched as a standalone Hastings restaurant with a grand opening on May 11 and a Chamber ribbon cutting three days later.
• Journey Audiology and Hearing Care, which expanded into a larger office at 830 Vermillion Street under Dr. Rachel Allgor, marking its growth with a ribbon cutting on May 21.
• Caring Hands Massage & Spa, 427 Vermillion St, which built out a Vichy shower, sauna, and couples massage room in a storefront downtown.
• Créme de la Créme, a handcrafted ice cream shop at 216 2nd Street East, a few blocks off Vermillion, that's become one of the newer reasons to walk downtown after dinner.

Five openings in one stretch of one small city is the kind of thing you'd expect to be scattered across two or three years. Instead they landed inside the same few months. That's not the interesting part of the story, though. The interesting part is what else happened at the same time, half a mile up the same street.

The corner that wouldn't move

For three years, the burned-out shell of the former Hastings Cooperative Creamery sat at the corner of Vermillion and 18th, a 110-year-old operation that closed in August 2023 and burned in a fire the following month. Eleven fire departments responded. The building sat gutted after that, and stayed that way. Residents complained about weeds, debris, and trespassers getting into the unstable structure. Insurance disputes dragged on. The city tried for more than two years to get the owner to act voluntarily.

That changed in February 2026, when the Hastings City Council approved a resolution ordering the property owner to demolish and clear the site by June 15 or face city-led demolition with the cost assessed back to them. Cleanup crews started in April. By mid-May, the site was cleared more than a month ahead of that deadline, with fresh dirt filling in the holes left by the removed buildings and machinery.

Hastings' economic development director, John Hinzman, connected the clearing to something specific happening on the street itself: a planned Vermillion Street reconstruction project that includes a new stoplight at 18th, which he said would increase the commercial viability of that corner. Nothing has been proposed for the site yet. Any redevelopment still has to go through the city's planning process. But for the first time in three years, the corner is a blank slate instead of a liability, and that shift landed in the exact same spring that five new businesses committed to leases within walking distance of it.

That's worth sitting with for a second if you live here. A burned-out building sitting on your main commercial street for three years doesn't just look bad. It sends a signal to anyone thinking about opening a storefront nearby: this street has an unresolved problem, and nobody knows when it gets fixed. Once that signal goes away, the calculation changes for everyone else on the block, whether or not any of them ever mention the creamery by name. The timing here is worth noticing even if nobody involved would say the two things were connected out loud.

What it means for a walk down the street

None of this requires you to think about Vermillion Street as an investment. It changes something more basic: what's actually available to you on a Tuesday night or a Saturday morning within a few minutes of home. A year ago, getting sushi in Hastings meant driving somewhere else. Now it means walking into Hasu. A year ago, the block near 18th Street was something you drove past quickly. Now it's dirt, which sounds unremarkable until you remember what used to be there.

The rest of downtown hasn't slowed down either

The storefronts are only half the reason Vermillion Street and downtown Hastings have felt busier this year. The city's Music + Market series wrapped its 2026 season at Levee Park on August 27 with Sir Psycho, a Red Hot Chili Peppers tribute act, closing out a summer that also brought Rumbleseat's John Mellencamp set, a Taylor Swift tribute called Taylor's Version, and Sons of Groove. The full 2026 lineup ran nearly every Thursday from June through late August, free, at the Rotary Pavilion along the riverfront.

Comedy in the Park closed out its own summer run in late August with stand-up from C. Willi Myles, and a second comedy date is already on the books for September 15. If live music at a smaller scale is more your speed, Wren + Wilde played The Confluence Hotel on August 28, and the hotel's calendar keeps filling in through the fall.

September brings its own reasons to be downtown or just outside it. Whistling Well Farm, out on St. Croix Trail South, was pointing toward a Labor Day weekend opening for its 2026 apple season, the kind of seasonal marker locals plan weekends around without needing a reminder. Alexis Bailly Vineyard has a Paint & Sip scheduled for September 10, and Levee Park has a Movie in the Park screening of Lilo & Stitch on September 11. The Autumn in the Valley Gala Fundraiser follows on September 13 out on Saint Croix Trail South, one of the fall calendar's bigger community draws.

None of this is unusual for a river town heading into fall. What's unusual is how much of it is stacking up in the same stretch of months that also produced five new storefronts and a cleared corner lot. Hastings has had slow years on Vermillion Street before. This isn't one of them.

If you've been putting off a walk down Vermillion Street

The honest version of this story is that most of what changed downtown this year happened quietly, one ribbon cutting at a time, and it's easy to miss five separate openings if you're not driving that stretch regularly. But add them up against a corner that finally stopped being a three-year eyesore, and the picture is a street doing something it hasn't done in a while: filling back in.

If you're already a Hastings resident, the practical move is simple. Walk it. Try the sushi. Check out what Caring Hands built out behind that storefront glass. Watch what goes up on the old creamery lot once the city's planning process runs its course, because whatever replaces it will shape that corner for a long time.

And if you're the kind of person who ends up thinking about Hastings not just as a place to live but as a place worth understanding block by block, that's a conversation Thomas Bullington is always glad to have. Let's Connect.