It was only a short walk along Hawthorne Avenue from the stage door of the Orpheum theater at 10th and Hennepin to the six story brown brick hotel a couple blocks away. The Hastings Hosted all the big names that brought Broadway and Vaudeville to the Mill City.
Even after the variety bills started to disappear from the Hennepin Avenue stages the Hastings payed host to night club entertainers. Decades before First Avenue’s walls of stars, the Hastings kept a collection that contained the likes of Peter Nero, The Smothers Brothers and Hugh O’Brian.
The hotel was purchased by Cedric Adams, Wheelock Whitney and H. Jack Dow in the late 1950’s. These gentlemen worked with Tom Hastings to create a show biz atmosphere around the Hotel’s Mar-Key Club. After the hotel was demolished in 1970 the club was relocated between Diamond Lil’s and and little Al’s on the corner of 4th and 8th Street.
According to Tom Hastings,the hotel wasn’t named for his family. The fellow who built the hotel back in 1911 was going with a girl from Hastings, Minnesota and he must have though he could impress her by naming a hotel for her home town.
