LOUIS ARMSTRONG: "A Castle in Queens for a King of Jazz"--Great pictures!

A Castle in Queens for a King of Jazz

October 9, 2003
For a King of Jazz, a Castle in Queens
By DAVID W. DUNLAP


TWENTY THOUSAND visitors would probably not travel every year to Corona, Queens, to see the Lucille Armstrong House.
But that's what it was: her house. She found it. She decorated it. (Oh, man, did she decorate it.) She presented it to her husband, Louis, in 1943 on his return to New York from an out-of-town gig. And she lived in it more than a decade after he died.
With her death in 1983, at the age of 69, the red-brick house at 34-56 107th Street froze in time. The Armstrongs had no children. No one has lived there since. So it never occurred to anyone that an all-turquoise kitchen might need freshening up, that an all-mirrored bathroom might need toning down, that vine-patterned silver-foil horizontal window blinds to match the vine-patterned silver-foil bedroom wallpaper might be a touch too much.

As a result, the Louis Armstrong House, which opens as a museum next week, is more than a shrine to Satchmo, the most influential figure in jazz history, from "Cornet Chop Suey" to "Hello, Dolly!" It is a record of a well-to-do 20th-century Queens household — exuberant, yes, but not pretentious — and is a worthy companion to other domestic landmarks like the 17th-century Wyckoff House in Brooklyn and the 18th-century Dyckman House in Manhattan.

"You don't see me in no big estates and yachts, that ain't gonna play your horn for you," Armstrong was quoted as saying in "Louis," by Max Jones and John Chilton (Little, Brown, 1971). "When the guys come from taking a walk around the estate, they ain't got no breath to blow that horn." Now, it's true that the Armstrongs had an unusually large side yard, with a goldfish-stocked pond. But they added that in later years. The house itself was a vision of modesty. At least from the outside. Inside, Mrs. Armstrong and her longtime decorator, Morris Grossberg of Manhattan, made their own kind of music.

"I don't think there's a square inch of paint in the house," said Michael Cogswell, director of the Louis Armstrong House and Archives at Queens College. "Even the ceilings of the closets have wallpaper." In this setting, gold-plated Selmer trumpets compete with golden swan-head bathroom fixtures by Sherle Wagner International and an almost pristine 1960's kitchen. The Sub-Zero refrigerator is paneled in turquoise to match the floor-to-ceiling cabinetwork. There are also a built-in countertop NuTone blender, a KitchenAid dishwasher with a "party" setting and a six-range, double-oven Crown stove, which was custom made for the Armstrongs.
"Most of our visitors will come because this was the home of Louis Armstrong," Mr. Cogswell said. "But other visitors will come purely for this historic house." Tours begin next Thursday, a day after the ribbon-cutting. Mr. Cogswell expects 15,000 to 20,000 visitors a year at the house, in a neighborhood where the most imposing structure is the steeple of Our Lady of Sorrows Roman Catholic Church.

"The house may not be the nicest looking front," Armstrong wrote in his own idiosyncratic style around 1970. "But when one visit the Interior of the Armstrong's home they see a whole lot of comfort, happiness & the nicest things. Such as that Wall to Wall Bed."
Mrs. Armstrong bequeathed the house to New York City, "in respectful memory of my deceased husband," Mr. Cogswell wrote in the newly published "Louis Armstrong: The Offstage Story of Satchmo" (Collectors Press). Title was transferred in 1986. Two years later, the house was designated a city landmark.

Queens College operates the house under license from the city and was given Armstrong's personal archives by the Louis Armstrong Educational Foundation. The collection is at the college's Flushing campus.
Converting the house into a museum cost $1.6 million. Mr. Cogswell said that every step has been challenging and time-consuming: raising money, assessing the building's condition, bringing it into compliance with city codes (among other things, an illegal third-story addition had to be removed) and planning the program and the design.
Platt Byard Dovell White, known for restoring landmark buildings, were the architects, succeeding Buttrick White & Burtis. The master planning was by Rogers Marvel Architects.

A great deal of effort has gone into preserving the appearance of the house as it was 20 years ago. For instance, new air-conditioning units have been installed behind the old plastic Carrier faceplates.
An even more startling illusion is the garage door, which looks like a roll-down but is in fact made of vertically hinged panels that can be folded open during business hours to reveal the visitors' center and entrance.
The yellow-and-silver diamond-patterned wallpaper in the rec room, echoing the sea-grass wallpaper in the living room, was recreated by Chambord Inc., of Hoboken, N.J., since it is no longer made.

"I was interested in the application of high-level preservation techniques to a condition that was so vernacular," said Samuel G. White of Platt Byard Dovell White. "You knew, if you looked long enough, you'd find that foil wallpaper rolled up for $2.99 a yard in a hardware store within 10 blocks."
Easily the most poignant issue was posed by a Wecolator chair lift on the stairway. In the eyes of the Buildings Department, the device somewhat limits necessary egress in a place of public assembly. But the architects argued that it was essential to keep the lift, in which Mr. Armstrong was once photographed.

"This vivid evocation of the last weeks of Louis's life is one of the most moving parts of the museum," Josh Brandfonbrener of Buttrick White & Burtis wrote in 2000. He said it would also buttress the role of the building as "one of the first `modern' house museums, recording how people lived at a specific time and place in history." The borough commissioner for the buildings agency agreed.

The lift is by no means the only sign of Louis Armstrong in the Louis Armstrong House. That beaming countenance radiates from portraits on the walls, including one by the singer Tony Bennett, and that gravelly voice can be heard in homemade recordings played over a new speaker system. Armstrong comments in one that his cluttered den "look like a whorehouse on Christmas morning."

Armstrong made some 650 reels of tape recordings: precious LP's and 78's, radio programs, conversations around the house and on the road with friends and fellow musicians. Then he decorated the tape boxes with his own collages.

Two reel-to-reel Tandberg tape decks still sit in a stained-pine cabinet in his den, along with a Dual turntable and a Marantz stereo console and FM tuner. "When at home he has several radios going all the time," the music critic Howard Taubman wrote in The New York Times Magazine for Jan. 29, 1950. " `Might pick up an idea or hear something,' he says."
But until the last years of his life, he was far more likely to be on the road than at home. That makes the house even more compelling. For a husband who wandered — in more than one direction — Mrs. Armstrong created a sanctuary.

She was his fourth wife. They met in 1938 at the Cotton Club, which was then on West 48th Street. He later wrote in Ebony magazine that Lucille Wilson was a "distinguished pioneer," the first to break the color line against dark-skinned dancers at the club. They married in 1942.
At the time, she lived in Harlem, and he lived out of hotel rooms. In Queens, the Brennan family was living in a frame house on 107th Street that dated from 1910. They had known Lucille since her school days in Corona. "These White people were moving out — going to Another Neighborhood," Armstrong wrote a quarter-century later in a reminiscence contained in the archives and reprinted in "Louis Armstrong, in His Own Words," edited by Thomas Brothers (Oxford University Press, 1999).
"And when they found out that Lucille come All the way from Harlem out in Corona looking to buy a house," he added, "why they were so glad to know that she liked their house and she told them that she would buy it — hmmm. They almost gave her the house for nothing."
Armstrong did not lay eyes on the house until his wife had bought and decorated it. He arrived by cab early one morning after returning from the road.

"One look at that big fine house, and right away I said to the driver `Aw man quit Kidding,' " Armstrong wrote. "I get up enough courage to get out of the Cab, and Ring the Bell. And sure enough the door opened and who stood in the doorway with a real thin silk Night Gown — hair in Curlers. To me she looked just like my favorite flower a Red Rose.

"The more Lucille showed me around the house the more thrilled I got," he wrote. "Right then and I felt very grand over it all. A little higher on the horse (as we expresses it)."

Not so high as to dwell in the cocoon of celebrity, however. "The Kids in our Block just thrill when they see our garage gate up, and our fine Cadillac ooze on out," Armstrong wrote. "They just rejoice and say, `Hi — Louis & Lucille — your car is so beautiful coming out of that raise up gate,' which knocks me out." (The "magic up and down Gate" will be reinstalled after a free-standing visitors' center is built across 107th Street.)
"All of the kids in Corona where I live came in front of my home and wished me a Happy Birthday, which thrilled old Satch," he wrote about his 69th birthday in 1969. "Saying carry on until you're a hundred years old."
After a series of hospitalizations for heart, kidney and liver disorders, he told a Times interviewer (July 4, 1970): "Now I have time to be at home, which I never did have — traveling all day long, buses, and going to airports, waiting all day for a plane, gets you there just in time to do the concert, no supper, no anything."

He added: "Well, I ain't going to do that no more. I needs the rest anyway. What's a better vacation than this?"
It lasted only a year. Armstrong died of a heart attack two days after celebrating his 71st birthday, on July 6, 1971, in his beloved Wall to Wall bed.

Mrs. Armstrong lived in the house 12 more years, and watched as neighborhood institutions like the Singer Bowl at Flushing Meadows-Corona Park and an elementary school on 113th Street were renamed in her husband's honor. On Sept. 20, 1983, in Boston to attend a Louis Armstrong Music Fund concert, she suffered a heart attack. She died there 13 days later.

After she had created the first real home for that legendary itinerant, it was Lucille Armstrong who never came back from the road.

Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

 

The house Lucille Armstrong (portrait, left) bought in 1942. The trumpet will be on display elsewhere when the house opens to the public.

 

Dining room

 

Armstrong boasted of his "Wall to Wall" bed.

 

The foil-papered master bathroom.

 

With the help of her decorator, Morris Grossberg, Mrs. Armstrong created a streamlined kitchen with custom-made stove and matching cupboards and clock.

You gotta love this

 

A living room with filigree window treatment.

 

An entry with a chair lift that was added toward the end of Armstrong's life.

 

Graphic wallpaper and fabric in a guest room.

 

Audio Girl,

Thanks for posting this! - very informative article and the pics are great...

Bob

 

Pops deserved every bit of it. He was very proud of that house....

But what tastes this woman had. I'd love to have that kitchen even now. What a sight.

 

Yea... The kitchen was definitely my favorite too!

 

that is the coolest looking kitchen!!!!!!

 

Thanks for the post. The book looks great!

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/t...glance&coliid=I3FL84OTBM7WDF&me=ATVPDKIKX0DER

doug

 

Great indeed! Thanks, AG

 

Very very cool stuff, AG. And I have to put in another vote for that kitchen--wow.

 

I was going to comment on that; That had to be revolutionary for the time. That's gotta be the coolest damn thing.

 

This definitely was their Home!

 

What a fantastic post..thanks so much..

 

Where's the bong?

 

Larry, i think Satch rolled his own.