DAVENPORT, Iowa — The Bix Beiderbecke Museum and Archives in downtown Davenport is moving.
The nonprofit will soon be located on 2nd Street after being in the basement of the Redstone building for five years. The organization hopes that the move will make the museum more visible so that it can better educate the public on a historical figure in Davenport's history.
"We're a little buried. You drive by you don't really know there's a museum in the building," Museum Director Nathaniel Kraft said.
The museum holds facts and artifacts of Bix Beiderbecke, one of the most popular jazz musicians of the 1920s — and also a Davenport native. Beiderbecke was also a famous composer and cornetist.
Now, more than 90 years after his death, the nonprofit museum will get a change of scenery as they plan to relocate to another building close by.
"We're going across the street, we're gonna be on the ground floor. We'll have a lot of window space, big sign out front," Kraft said.
The relocation comes after an eventful but challenging few years, including closing for one year due to COVID-19 and fighting off annual floods from the Mississippi River. There is hope that the move will bring more eyes to Beiderbecke's impact on music, while also ensuring the instruments, clothing and pictures from the past remain intact.
"The humidity would destroy them, and we would never be able to, you know, replace a lot of this stuff," Kraft said. "So, it's one of those things where the, the space served us, but the risks are a bit more than, you know, it's worth taking. We don't want to lose it," said Kraft.
Though Beiderbecke's name can be found all across the Quad Cities, Kraft said that the jazz icon's significance is still misunderstood by some Quad Citizens.
"People know his name, they know his face, they probably have some idea of who he is," Kraft said. "They might never have heard any of his songs. They might not even know really much about him."
"He changed music forever and that's something that people who live here can do," Kraft said. "It doesn't matter if it's music, it could be art, it could be anything they're good at, if they followed their dreams, this is something they could do."
Kraft says they're waiting on a renovation start date for the new building. He said they hope to open on March 10 of next year, which is Beiderbecke's birthday.