This story is part of the QCBJ’s annual Newsmakers edition. This year-end wrap-up by the Quad Cities Regional Business Journal’s staff includes some of the biggest stories we brought you during 2024. Each story also includes an update on the subject. Excerpts from the original stories as well as the new updates appeared in print in our Monday, Dec. 23 edition.
The initial story was published in February of 2024.
Work could begin in the summer of 2025 on the ambitious effort to redevelop the historic Annie Wittenmeyer Home campus into affordable senior and family housing, said Bruce Berger, Davenport’s director of community and economic development.
The team developing the project “was successful in obtaining funding for one of the two phases, i.e., the family project that would involve many of the buildings essentially on the north and west portions of the campus,” he told the QCBJ.
“Our understanding is that they are involved with a lot of pre-development work and hope to begin physical work as soon as summer,” he said, adding that the project area does not include the city-owned Aquatic Center, nor will it interfere with the center’s continued operation.
Meanwhile, at this writing, the effort to find an interim home for the Davenport Junior Theatre – which must relocate from the Wittenmeyer campus – continues after the plan to temporarily relocate the award-winning Davenport Parks and Recreation program to a site at NorthPark Mall was abandoned.
Regarding the future of NorthPark Mall, one potential change is certain. The plan to use the former Younker’s store in the city’s mall as the temporary home of Davenport Junior Theatre is no longer on the table.
The cost of renovating the space so it could adequately serve as the temporary home of the Davenport Parks and Recreation Department’s popular youth theater programming so the city and the theater’s board continue to
Currently, the city is looking to find a place that could house Junior Theatre programming immediately as well as be suitable for a number of years while the long-term solution is developed and built out.
“We hope to have further information on that in the coming weeks,” Mr. Berger said in November.
