KANSAS CITY, Mo. -- The shrine to some of baseball's best and previously-forgotten players is getting too big to miss largely out of necessity.
"We've simply run out of space," said Negro Leagues Baseball Museum (NLBM) President Bob Kendrick. "And every time we want to tell a new story, we literally have to tear something up."
That's the challenge for Kendrick and the museum, because every story has already fought incredibly hard to get there.
"American historians did us all a tremendous disservice," said Kendrick. "They kept this wonderful chapter of baseball and Americana away from us."
Chapters about how after playing at Kansas City's old Municipal Stadium, Negro Leagues players would come just a few blocks down to the 18th and Vine District to join the rich entertainment scene.
Jazz legends like Louis Armstrong, Ella Fitzgerald, Duke Ellington and Kansas City's own Charlie Parker would have been regulars then.
"All the jazz musicians wanted to be baseball players, all the baseball players wanted to be jazz musicians," said Kendrick.
Other chapters rattle fanbases with what might have been.
"Mr. Cub" himself, Ernie Banks, had to be convinced to go to Chicago after falling in love with Kansas City during his time with the Negro Leagues' Monarchs.
"So much so that when the Cubs came knocking, he didn't want to leave," said Kendrick. "[Older Monarchs players] had to push him out the nest because, here, and I can understand it, he was comfortable."
It's why Kendrick says legendary Monarch Buck O'Neil and other former players would pay the rent themselves to keep their one-room museum open in the early 1990's.
A move across the street in 1997 expanded the museum to 10,000 square feet. A $30 million fundraising campaign now is trying to triple that space just down the block. It'll bring people in for the baseball and teach them so much more.
"This is a civil rights, social justice institution," said Kendrick. "It's just seen through the lens of baseball."
The project will bring the Buck O'Neil Education and Research Center into the Historic Paseo YMCA, where the Negro Leagues founders formalized the league in 1920. New structures nearby will add apartments and hotel rooms, bringing back some of the energy that's been around 18th and Vine in the past.
"You have to understand, during that era of American Segregation, there were essentially 13 blocks where black folks could operate in this city," said Kendrick. "Within those 13 blocks, you had everything you needed."
Similarly, the NLBM Expansion isn't happening alone.
A handful of other renovation and development projects have either already been finished or are in the works now, like film critic Shawn Edwards' Boone Theater Restoration.
"It only makes sense because this part of Kansas City is the cradle to so much black history that has impacted the entire world," said Edwards.
Once the theater is restored, Edwards will open the Black Movie Hall of Fame, essentially in one room, just like now the NLBM started.
"The Negro Leagues Baseball Museum and Bob Kendrick, I study that and him to death," said Edwards. "They have created the blueprint."
The blueprint to remember the past and make it part of the future.
"It's based on one small simple principle: You won't let me play with you in the Major Leagues, then I'll create my own league," said Kendrick. "And man, what a league it was."