A Glimpse Into Satchmo’s Wonderful World

By Aaron Rutkoff

Before jazz giant Louis Armstrong moved into the modest, two-story red brick home in Corona – his residence for over 29 years until his death in 1971– he did not undertake the same careful precautions familiar to the average Queens homeowner.

In fact, legend has it that Satchmo never set eyes on the place until after his wife Lucille had already moved in and redecorated.

Michael Cogswell, director of the Louis Armstrong Archives at Queens College and an author dedicated to preserving Armstrong’s legacy, said, “He lived out of a suitcase, he didn’t care.”

As Cogswell tells it, the man known as Satchmo flew into New York City after a long tour in 1943 and directed a taxi driver to take him from the airport to an unfamiliar Queens address: 34-56 107th St.

Having spent most of his adult life living in hotel rooms, moving from city to city and nation to nation to spread the new sound of jazz music, Armstrong’s first glimpse of his new home overwhelmed him with pure disbelief. “The cab pulled up and Louis told the driver, ‘Hey man, stop kidding me,’” said Cogswell, as he led a batch of visitors up the steps of the newly restored house.

That house – preserved with all of the Armstrongs’ personal touches – is now open to overwhelm the public. The Louis Armstrong House, fresh from a two-year, $1.6 million renovation, re-opened with a ribbon-cutting on Oct. 15 as a museum, offering an intimate glimpse into the home life of one of America’s greatest artists, and one of the borough’s most famous residents.

A Restoration Unseen

“It’s not a big house, though it looks large from the outside,” Cogswell said. “It’s really your typical Queens Archie Bunker-style house.” 

From the outside that assessment holds up – the home seems scarcely large enough to contain the enormous, gravely basso voice for which Armstrong remains world famous.

But inside, the opulent and grand décor betrays an artistic and luxuriant flare that couldn’t be farther from Bunker’s workman-like aesthetic – a mirrored bathroom with gold fixtures, a dressing room with walls covered in silvery foil, and a wood paneled den, among other things.

“No one has lived here since the Armstrongs. It is totally preserved, frozen in time,” Cogswell explained. “A lot of the work we’ve done during the restoration you’re not supposed to see.”

The process took eight years of planning and fundraising, with the last two spent renovating the house. 

The Louis Armstrong Educational Foundation gave the house to New York City in 1986 – the same year it was designated as a City of New York Landmark and three years after Lucille died – and arranged for Queens College to administer the home, along with all of Armstrong’s personal possessions.

Cogswell, who has overseen the archives since they opened in 1994, said the home was made a National Historic Landmark in 1977, and is now filled with Armstrong’s personal belongings for people to view, from trumpets to awards.

For anyone familiar with the house over the last 20 years, one notable alteration was made during the renovation – the removal of an illegally constructed third floor, which was added by Lucille Armstrong without city permits after her husband’s death. 

A decaying garden shed adjoining the house was also demolished and rebuilt in red brick – now home to a museum gift shop.

Another challenge for the renovation centered on the vintage wallpaper designs that cover virtually every inch of wall in the house. Most were the height of fashion in the 1960s and are no longer manufactured, leading the conservators to search for a company capable of creating exact replicas of outdated wallpapers to replace the aged paper on the walls.

The result of all this meticulous attention is not only a detailed recreation of Satchmo’s physical home, but also a rare time capsule of decorating trends from mid-century America. 

In the kitchen, which is a dazzling room of aquamarine-lacquered cabinets and forgotten technologies, Cogswell noted, “You walk into this room and it feels like a period room, but imagine what people coming in here 100 years from now will think . . . Most of the historic homes in New York are from the 17th and 18th Centuries. To have a preserved kitchen from the 60s is very unique.”

Satchmo’s Ghost

Besides showcasing the tangible artifacts of Louis Armstrong’s life, the new museum that is his former residence is viscerally haunted with his outsized personality.

The ghostly specter of the jazz great is no accident, but a well-designed aspect of the house meant to bring Armstrong to life for visitors in a way that merely gazing at his desk or eyeing his gold-plated trumpets cannot.

Armstrong, as it happens, was a true audiophile. Beyond the hundreds of studio and concert recordings he made during his epic career in jazz, he also had a passion for – perhaps even an obsession with – home recordings of the mundane and sentimental.  Armstrong owned a reel-to-reel recorder and documented everything imaginable, from dinner with his wife to the sounds of his terrier.

“We have literally thousands of hours of tapes of Louis and the guys sitting around telling dirty jokes and playing music,” Cogswell said. One of the most innovative features of the house is the snippets of these tapes that play over hidden speakers in each of the rooms where they were recorded.

In the spacious den where the Armstrongs entertained visiting musicians, visitors can hear Louis teasing his dog; in the dining room, Louis describes the meal he is eating and the way he likes his chicken. All of the recordings feature that warm, unmistakable voice.

“Most people when they think of Louis Armstrong think of a great trumpet player or the guy who sang ‘Hello, Dolly,’” Cogswell said. “What we’re concerned with here is Louis Armstrong the person, and allowing people to get a feel for who that was.”

In addition to his tapes, Armstrong also kept hundreds of scrapbooks and collages, some of which are preserved and displayed in the house’s basement.

Louis’ Wonderful World

The memory of Louis Armstrong extends beyond the objects of his life and into the surrounding neighborhood. Several of his Corona neighbors survive to this day and can be found standing in the doorways on the block.

Whilhelmina Williams, 81, has lived in the home just past the Armstrong House for over 50 years. She moved in just four years after her celebrity neighbor, but remembers Louis Armstrong as just another nice, friendly man on the block.

“He was just ordinary,” Williams said. “We didn’t know he was famous. He was very friendly and his wife was beautiful.” 

She added, “I used to come in from work and he’d be sitting on those steps, talking to the kids.”

In a handwritten excerpt from Armstrong’s memoir on display at the museum, visitors can even read Satchmo’s warm feelings for his Corona neighborhood in his own words. The passage titled “Our Neighborhood” was written in 1971, just before Louis’ death, on the back of the diet sheets that he was known to distribute to visitors. 

“When my wife Lucille and I moved into this neighborhood there were mostly white people. A few colored families,” Armstrong wrote.  “Just think – through the [29] years that we’ve been living in this house, we have seen just about [three] generations come up on this particular block – 107th Street between 34th and 37th Ave.”

An Ambassador of Jazz

Louis Armstrong was born on July 6, 1901 in New Orleans and rose to become the most famous jazz musician of all time. He recorded hundreds of albums, and appeared in dozens of movies, breaking racial barriers to rise to the top of the music industry.

He was known as a charming, down-to-Earth man, known for his smile, laugh and tendency to play with a handkerchief. He was known across the world, but decided to settle in Queens, where many other jazz legends also lived.

He died in 1971 as a cultural icon, and some of his most popular songs are still played on the radio, including “What A Wonderful World, “A Kiss To Build A Dream On,” and “Helly, Dolly.”

For More Information

For more info on Satchmo, his house or the Louis Armstrong Archives at Queens College, log on to www.satchmo.net. A photo tour of the house is available at the site. For real-life tours, the house is open from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday to Friday, and 12 p.m. to 5 p.m. Saturday and Sunday. General admission is $8, with a $4 student and senior price. Admission to the house is free for members of the Louis Armstrong Museum.