The Quad City Symphony Orchestra and St. Ambrose University in Davenport plan to band together to build a new $24-million home for music in downtown Davenport.
The two institutions plan to split the cost of the multi-purpose facility – including a 500-seat concert hall – to be built on a vacant lot in the 600 block of West 2nd Street, that formerly housed the Davenport YMCA, before it closed in 2020 and was torn down in 2022.
In a recent presentation to the Scott County Board of Supervisors, seeking $120,000 to help match a planned state of Iowa grant, the QCSO said it doesn't have a home of its own and relies “on multiple rented and repurposed spaces that limit efficiency and growth.”
The presentation said SAU facilities are “outdated and restrictive,” with “antiquated facilities that do not meet our music department’s needs or allow for growth.”
The QCSO wants to “build a facility worthy of our musical legacy.” The new building (eyed for a 2029 opening) would primarily serve the youth ensembles of the orchestra, and its growing private lesson program, and not replace the professional orchestra’s main performance venues of Adler Theatre in Davenport and Centennial Hall in Rock Island.
The new facility will allow the orchestra to:
- Expand artistic and educational programming.
- Foster engagement with underserved audiences.
- Improve access to local events and activities.
- Grow the cultural corridor on 2nd and 3rd Street of downtown Davenport.
QCSO executive director Brian Baxter said Wednesday, July 15, that they are seeking $120,000 each from the county and city, to help leverage State of Iowa Economic Development Authority funds through a Community Attraction and Tourism (CAT) Grant of up to $1 million, for which they'd apply.
“We have these hugely expanding education programs, our youth ensembles, and in particular our private lesson program,” he said. “And they rehearse and we offer lessons in a total of 12 or so different facilities annually. So we're kind of all over the map, all over the Quad Cities.
“We're not a priority in any of our venues. And frankly, for the education programs, they are at a level that is on par with similar programs in much larger metro areas, and we need space that reflects that,” Baxter said. “We also do a lot of performances and events around the community in addition to what we do in the Adler Theatre and Centennial Hall, and this new space will allow us to have a home for everything that we do except that. Our large-scale performances at the Adler and Centennial Hall will remain in those spaces.”
The new “Building Harmony” facility plan is a “huge deal, transformative for the organization, puts us on the map literally for our programs, and we're just super thrilled about it,” especially the partnership with SAU, he noted. “We explored over the course of quite a while, does this actually work, the two of us working together? Because we're very different institutions.
"And we, in studying it in great detail, we learned yes, we can make this happen. It will be maximally used, civically impactful, like a beacon for the Quad Cities. So we're super excited about it. Super thrilled about it.”
“Because our two institutions coming together, the performance hall side of it, that size was really important to St. Ambrose. And for us as a symphony, being able to rehearse multiple orchestras at the same time was really important,” Baxter said of plans for several halls in the space, beyond the main 500-seat venue. “This will be a home for everything QCSO. Our youth ensembles will have one place that they rehearse now. They will be in this new space.
"And then there's a whole suite of music classrooms and practice rooms and the like where we'll be able to teach lessons to breakout sectionals, and those rooms are all kind of shared with St. Ambrose.”
The youth ensembles (headed by the QC Youth Symphony Orchestra, which last month completed a European tour) mainly rehearse at Bettendorf, Pleasant Valley and Moline high schools, and Baxter said they’re dependent on the schools’ availability.
“The way that the students know where they're supposed to go for rehearsal is we have to email them each week with where it is. I mean, obviously we have a plan for the year, but then it can change because there's a lot that goes on and in these schools, and they have a lot of priorities to serve,” he said. “And just the level of this program is so high and they need space. They need their own space. So this becomes that space.”
The QCSO (headquartered at 327 Brady St., Davenport) and St. Ambrose (at 518 W. Locust St., Davenport) have acquired the vacant property, the former Davenport YMCA site.
“It's a wonderful location. It showcases our accessibility to the whole Quad Cities,” Baxter said. “It’s just a couple blocks off of the Centennial Bridge. Very, very accessible. Right in that cultural corridor. I mean, if you think about everything that's downtown right through the Figge, the Adler of course, the Capitol Theater, the Last Picture House, Common Chord, and we’ll be across the street from the German American Heritage Center, so it's a really excellent kind of piece of the puzzle down there.
“And our two institutions, QCSO and St. Ambrose University, we are long-term, long-established institutions,” he added. “We're not going anywhere. We're not a flight risk, you know. So this is going to be a huge thing for economic development in downtown Davenport. One of the priorities in the city is to continue to invest and reinvest pushing westward, especially toward the West End. So this can kind of be a part of that progress.”
They plan to break ground in about 18 to 24 months and open the facility in 2029, Baxter said.
The QCSO Youth Symphony recently concluded a successful tour of Spain and Portugal, where they gave three concerts last month, and Baxter went along.
“So it went really, really well. It was really amazing to kind of to see these students really step up, because when you're in a foreign country, different language, you really have to rise to the occasion and learn to navigate and perform excellently, not just musically in the performance but also as we're traveling,” he said.
“For many of the students, it was their first time in Europe. It was their first time out of the United States. It was their first time on an international flight. There were some that it was their first flight at all. So, you know, some students haven't been that far beyond the Quad Cities. So it was really, really powerful.”
St. Ambrose musical needs
SAU president Amy Novak is a member of the QCSO board, and she said Thursday, July 16, that at a meeting, they discussed expanding and the “needs they had as the Quad City Symphony to really address shortage of space in their private lesson program and also in some of their smaller performance venues,” she said.
“Simultaneously, on the campus of St. Ambrose, we were really discussing the growth of our co-curricular music programs and the limitations that our almost 60-year-old building was creating for growth of our music programs, and even the enhancement of technology and recording studios and recording spaces.”
Novak said the 60-year-old Galvin Fine Arts Center has limitations as a music facility, with very few spaces for students to practice. Its performance venues are the 1,100-seat Allaert Auditorium and 110-seat Madsen Hall. “We convened a meeting and began a conversation about what would it look like if the two of us partnered. And I'm really excited about where this potentially can go,” the SAU head said.
Galvin, at 2101 Gaines St., was designed at a time when “it just wasn't serving the contemporary environment in music that we have today,” Novak said, noting the SAU piano lab can only hold nine students at a time in Davis Hall. “We have really very limited practice space for our students.”
“We have to move band instruments in and out of a space because choir uses that same space,” she said of Galvin. “If we want to grow those activities, we really are not in a position to do that…When we really asked the question, what would it take to renovate this? Most of the builders that we spoke with were saying to us, you would be better served to start over. And so, if you want to try and look, we've done a very significant effort on our campus in the past to really renovate space. But in this particular case, we didn't feel that renovating was as viable. and we simply needed more space.”
With a new facility, Galvin will continue to be used for the Ambrose theater, mass communications and media programs, including housing the radio station, KALA-FM, and spaces for visual art.
“But it'll allow us to really spread that out a little bit more and to really give some dedicated space to our music program,” Novak said, noting nearly all SAU music performances would move to the new home.
The new facility will give both the QCSO and SAU flexibility and mobility to meet their needs, she said, noting QCSO youth ensemble students and private lessons will be mainly after 4 p.m., and Ambrose students will mainly use it between 8 a.m. and 4 p.m. The new performance spaces also will offer flexibility for different kinds of concerts and programs, Novak said.
“If it's maybe just a student recital, maybe it's a small chamber group, that can be in a smaller space. But it also can expand if we have a larger fall concert and want to be able to perform for a little bit larger audience,” she said. “It can expand to meet that requirement as well. So it will expand classroom space. Right now we are very limited. We have some of those happening in a house off campus for teaching purposes. The lessons are being taught there. We have the piano lab in the basement of Davis Hall, which has very limited capacity.
“So this really opens up additional space for music and for classrooms. And I would just add the nature of music has also been enhanced by technology,” Novak added. “We've not been able to really build in the sort of technological infrastructure into our current facility, and we believe the new facility will allow us to do that as well.”
As for concerts, SAU tends to offer many programs on Friday nights, and the QCSO on Saturdays and Sundays.
“When we did all of that analysis, there was very little overlap. And so that is part of the rationale of saying, wow, we could actually create something that each of us individually wouldn't be able to build on our own, and do it in such a way that we can also leverage a much bigger space by both fundraising for it,” the SAU president said. “Also I'm excited for our students to have access and opportunities to interact with professional musicians through the Quad City Symphony. We hope to be able to do more partnering with them in performances.
“And similarly, I hope that young people are inspired by students at St. Ambrose who are studying music and who are pursuing careers in music education or music performance,” she said. “And so I think there's going to be a lot of really positive intergenerational synergy as a result of this.”
“We are really grateful to be able to see this potential vision for something that we think will be an enhancement, not just to St. Ambrose or the Quad Cities, but I think to the entire community,” Novak said. “I think we will see people benefiting from this, and it's in the location that I think will be beneficial for the downtown Quad Cities. And so it's exciting to do this, but we certainly owe a debt of gratitude to our donors who continue to commit and see the vision and the value proposition of St. Ambrose and its contributions to the larger Quad Cities.”
SAU and QCSO will work on joint fundraising for the campaign (groundbreaking would not occur until over 80% of funds are secured), and there are some potential federal funding mechanisms that may be available, Novak said. “We’re really collaborating with private donors, businesses, and corporations across the Quad Cities, and then private foundations, as well as the state, county, and local governmental entities. And we've cast a pretty wide net here in an effort to see what dollars can be secured in support of this project.”
The new facility also may be rented to other cultural organizations, Baxter said.
“There's third-party opportunities for whether it's a music ensemble rehearsing or using the space for performance or events,” he said. “There will most definitely be third-party opportunities. It will be very heavily used by us and St. Ambrose. You know, it's going to be very packed on that end, but there's always room for more. So like, especially in the summer, because the university's out of session in the summer and we are too. Probably more opportunity in the summer. But that's definitely something that we've been working on as well.”
This story was produced by WVIK, Quad Cities NPR. We rely on financial support from our listeners and readers to provide coverage of the issues that matter to the Quad Cities region and beyond. As someone who values the content created by WVIK's news department, please consider making a financial contribution to support our work.
