Negro League Baseball Hotel included in museum’s expansion project

By Ryan Hennessy

Published: Jul. 25, 2024

https://www.kctv5.com/2024/07/25/negro-league-baseball-hotel-included-museums-expansion-project/

KANSAS CITY, Mo. (KCTV) - The Negro League Baseball Museum expansion project is growing with two developers promising to bring a 100-unit hotel on top of that expansion and up to 200 apartments next door to it.

The project will be located at 18th and Paseo, just north of the YMCA, which will become the Buck O’Neil Education and Research Center.

Negro League Baseball Museum President Bob Kendrick called it the ideal place for expansion.

“It was that very building that Andrew “Rube” Foster led a group of eight independent black baseball team owners into a meeting,” Kendrick said. “Out of that meeting on February 13, 1920, they walked away having established the Negro National League, the first successful organized black baseball league in the country.”

The museum itself is not moving, but they are calling the expansion a campus that will reside on 2.8 acres of parking lots between Paseo and Grove Street.

Back in 2023, the museum announced its intention to grow with a 30,000-square-foot facility that Kendrick estimated will cost between $25 and $30 million.

“It firmly celebrates our complete commitment to this area, Buck O’Neil would roll over in his grave with the thought of us moving this museum somewhere else,” Kendrick said. “We get to look ahead to continuing to try and increase the vibrancy of this great community known as 18th and Vine.”

The developers partnering with the museum are Grayson Capital LLC and Corbella LLC. Grayson’s Founder and CEO Michael Collins said the hotel would go on top of that expansion.