The King Of Queens

The jazz musician Louis Armstrong’s impeccably maintained home in a modest New York City neighbourhood is a testament to his — and mid-century design’s — legacy.

- M. H. Miller

CORONA, QUEENS, is an unassuming New York City neighbourhood. Nearby is the stainless steel Unisphere from the 1964 World’s Fair, and three miles west is Flushing’s Main Street, with its crowded dim sum parlours. Corona, though, feels like a suburb wedged into the city, and it’s here, on a quiet residential block, with modest century-old detached homes with small cement porches and aluminum siding, that you’ll find one of the country’s great unheralded design museums: the jazz trumpeter and bandleader Louis Armstrong’s miraculously preserved house, where he lived from 1943 until his death in 1971, at age 69.

Armstrong was born in New Orleans in 1901, dropped out of school as a child and was a successful touring musician in his early 20s. By 1929, he was living in Harlem, though as one of the most popular recording artists in the country, he travelled about 300 nights a year. In 1939, he met his fourth and final wife, Lucille Wilson, a dancer at Harlem’s Cotton Club. Lucille, who spent part of her childhood in Corona, decided it was time for her husband to settle down in a house, a real house, instead of living out of hotel rooms. (Even their wedding took place on the road, in St. Louis, at the home of the singer Velma Middleton.) One day, when Armstrong was away at a gig, she put a down payment of $8,000 (around $119,000 [(approx. S$165,000)] in today’s money) on 34-56 107th Street. She didn’t tell him she’d done this until eight months later, during which time she made the mortgage payments herself. (Lucille didn’t like being told no; as Hyland Harris, who manages the Louis Armstrong House Museum gift shop, located in what was once the garage — the biggest aberration between the house today and its past incarnations — told me, “There is a reason why she was the last wife.”)