Around 1,400 visitors came to the B.B. King Museum & Delta Interpretive Center in December 2019.
And December is typically a slow month, according to Malika Polk-Lee, the museum’s executive director.
That number dwindled to 76 in December 2020.
“That will tell you the drastic change and what we’ve experienced,” Polk-Lee told the Indianola Rotary Club this week in a program that detailed the COVID-19 pandemic’s toll over the last year, as well as hope in the near future. “That was just one month out of the year that I chose to share with the board, looking at the numbers.”
The museum, which opened in 2008, has proven to be one of the most significant economic development and tourism projects in the city in the last two decades, but with a consistent draw of between 25,000 and 30,000 guests per year all but wiped out, Polk-Lee and her staff have done all they can do to keep the doors open – on a limited basis – while completing a multi-million-dollar expansion that began well before last year’s shutdown.
“This year itself has been like no other for the museum, as well as it’s been for everyone,” Polk-Lee said. “But we’ve tried to maintain some operation hours. This time of year, we’re usually open Tuesday-Sunday. We had to reduce those hours, and now we’re open Thursday through Saturday. That was for budgetary constraints, to conserve money, as well as following the COVID guidelines and restrictions.”
One of the partnerships the museum has fostered over the past couple of years has been with a riverboat company that books tours to destinations like the museum.
These tours included a stop at the museum, as well as a buffet lunch and live concert at Club Ebony.
“2020 would have been a record year for us on riverboat tours,” Polk-Lee said. “I think we had 98 booked for the year, before they were canceled…It would have been like nothing we’ve ever seen before, and the pandemic wiped all of that out.”
So far in 2021, 29 bookings have been canceled, she said, but with an increase in vaccinations, relaxed restrictions and decreased virus case numbers throughout the state, Polk-Lee is optimistic that two tours that are booked for this month will make it to the Delta.
Unlike 2020, 2021 could be salvageable.
That is of course if the museum is able to cash in on what had been estimated to be over a $3 million expansion project that should be finished this spring.
Even with increased construction costs and shipping delays, due to the pandemic, the project will be finished this year.
The only question is if state and local guidelines will allow the kind of celebration the museum envisioned when they took on the project several years ago.
Construction is close to done on the courtyard project and the indoors component, awaiting the arrival of the display fabricators next month.
“We are hoping they will actually be on site in April to start installation and finish up no later than the first week in May,” Polk-Lee said. “We would like to do a soft opening for the community in May and do a grand opening that first weekend in June.”
It’s hard to know what a grand opening might look like, considering the state still has restrictions on the number of people who can attend indoor and outdoor events, which makes booking concert acts and paying for national advertising even more suspect for a museum that can hardly afford a losing weekend.
In the meantime, Polk-Lee is dedicated to keeping the museum open, even if it’s primarily for local education programs.
“We are not just the museum,” she said. “We are a component of the community, and we try to ensure that we are active in the community, as far as being that cultural institution for the community and provide those cultural services and outlets for the community.”
Polk-Lee said the museum was awarded a grant last year that allowed it to open a free computer lab for kids in the community. It is staffed with two certified teachers, as well as a certified school counselor.
She said they have been averaging around seven kids a day.
In 2020, COVID-19 arrived just ahead of what is usually the busiest time of year for the museum. This year, vaccines and reduced virus case numbers have arrived just ahead of the same period.
They may have come just in time for the museum.
