Negro Leagues Baseball Museum partners with KC developers for expanded campus
A new state-of-the-art Negro Leagues Baseball Museum building is planned just north of the Buck O’Neil Education and Research Center in the historic Paseo YMCA.
By Thomas Friestad – Staff Writer, Kansas City Business Journal
Jul 23, 2024
Kansas City's Negro Leagues Baseball Museum will pair a state-of-the-art new location with adjacent projects in partnership with two local developers.
The museum announced Tuesday that it will partner with Grayson Capital LLC and Corbella LLC for a visionary campus on 2.8 acres of surface parking and vacant land southwest of 18th Street and The Paseo. The campus will start with an expanded 30,000-square-foot museum facility, just north of the Buck O’Neil Education and Research Center in the historic Paseo YMCA, where Andrew "Rube" Foster established the Negro Leagues in 1920.
The Negro Leagues museum will anchor the 18th & Paseo campus as a destination with artifacts, immersive exhibition and program space. It also will feature an event rooftop deck, event space, expanded retail space, museum store and café. The museum in May 2023 announced plans to triple its current space — in a building shared with the American Jazz Museum at 1616 E. 18th St. — and launched a $25 million capital campaign called Pitch for the Future.
Next to the new facility, the campus will include a 100-key premium hotel, to be designated as the official hotel of Negro Leagues Baseball Museum. The hotel is planned with premium event and conference space and dining options. It also will incorporate artwork, artifacts, interior design features and curated programming that, together with the museum, will further tell the story of the Negro Leagues, its teams and ballplayers.
Rounding out the campus is a new mixed-income apartment development with as many as 200 units southeast of 18th Street and Lydia Avenue. The Kansas City Council in December approved a development agreement with Grayson and Corbella for at least 150 apartments and about 12,500 commercial square feet in two phases on about 2.6 acres of city-owned surface parking. CEO Michael Collins leads Grayson, and Bryan Dennie leads Corbella.
On the whole, the campus promises to enhance cultural, entertainment, residential and transit offerings in the historic 18th & Vine Jazz District. Project partners foresee significant economic and cultural benefits from the more than 162,000 projected annual visitors to the museum, research center and hotel.
"This project is more than just a development, but a visionary experience that pays tribute to the resilience and spirit of the Negro Leagues and the historic 18th & Vine district," Bob Kendrick, president of the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum, said in a release.
The campus team will announce additional project partners in the next few weeks, as well as project designs in the near future. Collins said in an email that the Negro Leagues museum would be built ahead of the hotel and apartments, with those uses potentially being built at the same time, if permitted by construction staging and the site's density. Environmental remediation also is needed for part of the city's surface parking, owing to a past Circle K gas station.
