SATCHMO WAS HERE.(scheduled opening of Louis Armstrong House and Archives museum in Queens, New York)(Brief Article)

For nearly half his life, Louis Armstrong lived at 34-56 107th Street, in Corona, Queens. When Armstrong and his fourth wife, Lucille, bought the place, in 1943, it was a boxy two-story wooden house in a mostly white neighborhood; today, it is a boxy two-story brick-faced house in an area that is mostly Hispanic. On a recent afternoon, Michael Cogswell, the director of the Louis Armstrong House & Archives, was standing in front of the house, discussing plans for its future. He gestured toward the attached garage, which contained a ladder, an old door, and an assortment of unidentifiable junk. "This is the visitors' center," he said purposefully, if prematurely.

Sometime in the next year, the Armstrong house is scheduled to open to the public as the city's newest and perhaps most intimate museum. Visitors will be invited not just to tromp through the Armstrongs' kitchen (done from floor to ceiling in turquoise) and poke around their den (panelled in wood, with an early reel-to-reel tape machine) but to take in the bedroom (silver wallpaper with white lilies), and even the master bath. (Armstrong, a lifelong devotee of the laxative Swiss Kriss, had speakers installed in the bathroom so that he could have music piped in from the den.) In addition to the Armstrongs' furniture, in storage while the house undergoes a $1.6-million restoration, Cogswell is hoping to fill the rooms with everyday objects, like cereal boxes and perfume bottles, circa 1965. "The effect we want to give is that the Armstrongs just stepped out," he said, standing in the couple's walk-in closet (papered in what looks like crinkly aluminum foil).

The idea of turning the Armstrong house into a museum has been kicking around ever since Lucille died, in 1983. (Louis died in 1971.) First, though, someone had to go through the contents of the place, a surprisingly laborious task. In addition to being the most celebrated jazz musician of his generation--Dizzy Gillespie once called him "jazz in person"--Armstrong, it turns out, was a collage-maker, a prolific writer, a lover of memorabilia, a home-recording enthusiast, and a pack rat. "We literally have hundreds of hours of tape of Louis and the guys sitting around the dressing room swapping dirty jokes and band stories," Cogswell ...