by Joseph Back

The Great Rivers Landing development project is well underway near the riverfront on West 2nd Street, just north of the Highway 61 bridge into Hastings. The 100,000 square foot project is a partnership operating under the name of Con_uence Development between local resident Patrick Regan and Bill Weyland of City Properties Group out of Louisville, Kentucky. The website for City Properties Group, weylandventures.com, details its many historic rehabilitation projects, many of which are in downtown Louisville itself. The partnership known as Con_uence Development, meanwhile, is looking

to transform the 100,000 square foot site of the old Hudson Manufacturing plant, the last industrial site on the Hastings riverfront,into a mixed-use historic rehabilitation project and makes use of both State and Federal Historic Tax Credits. So what about more details?

Most recently owned by the Hudson sprayer company as a farm-related (sprayer making) business, the future site of the Great Rivers Landing redevelopment was purchased by the City of Hastings Economic Development and Redevelopment Authority in 2010, and then taken over by Con_uence Development in 2015. Currently set to become the Great Rivers Landing, the site of the Great Rivers Landing has an uncertain completion date, with 2021 being a possibility, per John Hinzman of the City of Hastings. Among the different cleanup measures on the former industrial site were those related to PCB and asbestos abatement, and the installation of a vapor intrusion mitigation system to actively vent soil vapor. The Hudson Manufacturing plant site isn’t the only historic aspect of the plan though. Formerly located across the street on the site of a present parking lot was the one-time maker of exquisite cut glass pieces known as the Standard Engraving the Glass Company, the building more recently home to the First National Bank building. Now redeveloped to face the future with con_dence, the space where the Standard

Engraving and Glass Company was once located at 2nd and Eddy Street was a hubbub of activity back in the day. Meanwhile, the Hudson Manufacturing plant across the way was a one-time sprayer factory for Hudson Sprayers, a farm-related business. But what of the cut glass company?

Better known as Hastings Cut Glass, the Standard Engraving and Glass Company of Hastings, Minnesota operated from 1919 to 1923, or partly concurrent with the old Hudson Manufacturing plant across the way. Per materials from the Jacobsen family and provided to the Journal by Jim Estlund, the process leading to the exquisite cut glass masterpieces is detailed here for Hastings Journal readers.

Just prior to and after moving to Hastings in March of 1919, the Standard Engraving and Cut Glass Company was owned in part by stock holdings of A. W. Goranson and Alma Goranson, said stock acquired as a “conveyance” for a new home they had built in Minneapolis. Cut glass was a pre-Depression era fashion made from three types of glass at the Hastings plant: lead, potash, and lime. The base product for these pieces was sourced from several different places: the Libbey Glass Company of Toledo, Ohio, H. R. Fry of Rochester Pennsylvania; Heisey Glass of Newark Ohio, the United States Glass Company of Tif_n, Ohio, and Anchor- Hocking Glass Company of Lancaster, Ohio. In the mid-1920s Hastings Cut Glass would move closer to the Pennsylvania-Ohio supply chain, but for a brief time three types of cut glass were processed at the glass factory: lead, potash, and lime. Marold Estlund worked for the company at this time.

The process to make cut glass was intricate, to say the least.

To start out, the design was “roughed” on the piece to be made by the use of both horizontal and vertical steel mills, while a _ne-powdered carborundum (an abrasive) was _owed through the use of water, then

being smoothed through the use “of large natural stone wheels,” with scratches removed by large cloth bluffs and pumice (a volcanic rock with air chambers). To polish the cut glass, wood wheels were faced with felt and (jeweler’s) black rouge. The designs were _nished with

a spindle lathe with “different sizes and shapes of aloxide, alundum, and carborundum,” and then polished with

a sulphuric and hydro_uoric bath before being dried in

sawdust. Any acid etching or copper wheel engraving done at the business was “experimental,” per the history. So with the etched groove process of the Standard Engraving and Cut Glass Company at the site of the Con- _uence Development being detailed, what of the present Great Rivers Landing Con_uence project now going on across the street? Hastings Community Development Director John Hinzman gave us the details. A summary follows.

The project in partnership with Patrick Regan of the Hastings Bus Company, among other businesses, with Bill Weyland of Weyland Ventures out of Louisville, Kentucky, began in terms of site work in August 2019 with a project completion date of 2021. Alongside hotels rooms, apartments and a 400 seat banquet facility, there will be a restaurant and retail space as well. The project will include a privately-maintained riverfront park open to the public, with a 3,000 square foot overlook deck recently opened, was made possible through $4.9 million in grant funding through Metropolitan Council, Dakota County Community Development Agency, US EPA, and the Minnesota Department of Employment and Economic Development. For the ancillary details, a few are worth noting.

Among them are that the Grant funding included construction of the 123 stall parking ramp located south of the site, and that the site involved signi_cant environmental cleanup including exterior and interior soil removal, given its former use as an industrial site. Meanwhile, the project continues!