[Dixielandjazz] Lucille's House -

[Stephen Barbone]

If you are a Louis Armstrong fan, read this. How lucky I was to grow up
in Flushing, Queens, NYC, not far from the house that Lucille bought and
made into a home for Louis.

Cheers,
Steve Barbone


October 9, 2003 NEW YORK TIMES

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.