While the late great trumpeter and vocalist Louis Armstrong (1901–71) had global renown and impact, for many decades of his life, his home was Corona, Queens. Today, the house he inhabited is a national landmark and open to the public as the Louis Armstrong House Museum. Executive director Regina Bain said that was his wish. “His legacy is massive, it’s huge, and it’s definitely something that requires time to learn about,” said Bain, who became the executive director in August 2020. “There are things that many people know, such as [the song] ‘What a Wonderful World.’ Some people may also know ‘Hello Dolly.’ Fewer people know about him as a visual artist, a collage artist, about film, about who he was to the community.”
Bain, herself an artist and educator, immersed herself in Armstrong’s music and listened to how musicians and historians spoke about him. She also heard from the kids who grew up in Queens when Armstrong lived there.
Armstrong’s fourth wife, Lucille, who died in 1983, had in her will that the home would go to New York City to become a museum. City University of New York asked Queens College to steward this project, but bringing the vision to fruition took a while. Before the museum opened in 2003, there was programming from the Louis Armstrong Educational Foundation. Dating back to the 1980s, Pops Is Tops, a children’s concert, was held annually in a garden (owned by the Armstrongs) adjoining the home. Concerts are still held in that garden. In the 1990s the archive opened at Queens College in the Rosenthal Library.
“The people of the community were taking care of the house,” said Bain. “There was a woman who worked for the Armstrongs while they were alive. She cleaned, she cooked, she helped run the household .… After they died, she did not allow the house to go into disrepair. She took care of the home for a decade. There were others in the community who also protected the house.”
Today, the house museum is a three building campus: the historic home; and the Louis Armstrong Center across the street, which opened in 2023, is the permanent home for a 60,000-piece physical and digital archive. (When designing it, the center’s architect angled it to face the house.0 Within the center is a 75-seat performance space, which is also a space for programming. A third building is Selma’s Place, the home of the late Selma Heraldo (1923–2011), who left her home to the museum.
Anyone can book a ticket online to take a 45-minute guided tour of the house museum. No one has lived in the house since the Armstrongs — so the furniture, wallpaper, paintings and other objects are all theirs. Bain said it feels like they just stepped out and will return home soon. Researchers come to study the archives at the center, but also love to spend time in the home, feeling the essence of one of the jazz greats.
“The Center is where we can do housing workshops in the legacy of Louis and Lucille, two Black artists who owned their own home in the 1940s, and why that’s significant, and how that affects people who are trying to be homeowners in the community now,” said Bain. “It’s where we can have justice arts workshops .… Concerts, of course. We have an artists’ residency program. Artists can apply.
“We also have archival tours,” she added. “We do listening sessions. We take records that are in the Armstrong archives and we play them and have discussions about them. If you are a researcher writing a book, of course you can make an appointment.”
Selma’s Place is being renovated and will become office space and community space to tell the story of the people in the community that made Corona the place the Armstrongs wanted to live. The stories of kids who grew up in the neighborhood have been assembled into the Corona Collection of 15 oral histories that will debut this October as an exhibition at the Louis Armstrong Center and will also be available online at louisarmstronghouse.org.
“They tell stories about who Armstrong was as a person,” Bain said. “They didn’t know he was a star. They knew him as a person in the community who cared about them. … We’re really excited about what this will mean for our community and for the broader community thinking about Black history, jazz and mentorship.”
As executive director, Bain feels responsible for the thriving of this mission to keep jazz culture alive in Queens and New York City. Visitors come to the museum and center from all over the world.
“We want people to create from the archives — books, film and more,” said Bain. “We must remember who we are; that is what propels us into the future. We know that Black history and Black culture have always persisted. So, we persist, the culture persists, the art persists.”
For more info, visit louisarmstronghouse.org.