[Dixielandjazz] Louis Armstrong House Museum Expansion

[Stephen G Barbone]

December 21, 2010, NY TIMES - By Ben Ratliff

Visitors’ Center Planned for Louis Armstrong House and Museum

Blueprints and design have just been completed for a visitors’ center  
dedicated to the life and artifacts of Louis Armstrong, according to  
Michael Cogswell, director of the Armstrong House and Museum, in  
Corona, Queens. The center will take a year and a half to build, and  
will sit across the street from the three-story brick house on 107th  
Street, which has been open to the public since 2003.
It will contain Armstrong’s copious collection of personal artifacts,  
which for reasons of space and preservation has mostly been housed at  
the Benjamin S. Rosenthal Library at Queens College, several miles  
away. The collection includes 20 linear feet of letters and papers  
(Armstrong was an enthusiastic correspondent, even with fans he’d  
never met), trumpets, photographs and scrapbooks, more than 700 reel- 
to-reel tapes whose boxes he decorated with colorful collages and a  
chunk of the banister from the Colored Waifs’ Home for Boys in New  
Orleans, where he lived in 1913 and 1914. Since last Wednesday, much  
of the astonishing material has been viewable at the Museum’s Web  
site, louisarmstronghouse.org.