SCOTT DETROW, HOST:
Louis Armstrong was a founding father of American music, a virtuoso trumpeter who helped define the language of jazz and an irrepressible singer who reset the terms of popular song. He was also a global celebrity who lived in a working-class neighborhood in Queens. For the last 20 years, his home has been open to the public as a museum, and now it has company - the Louis Armstrong Center just across the street. Nate Chinen from member station WRTI brings us this report.
(SOUNDBITE OF LOUIS ARMSTRONG SONG, "WEST END BLUES")
NATE CHINEN, BYLINE: For nearly 30 years, through the height of his fame, Louis Armstrong lived with his wife Lucille in a house in Corona, Queens. There, he practiced his horn, welcomed visitors and tended to a world of his making - homemade tape recordings, photo collages, journals and correspondence. Since 2003, the brick-faced home has been open to the public as the Louis Armstrong House Museum, a humble but hallowed site of pilgrimage for fans from around the world. Now it has a gleaming new neighbor across the street, the Louis Armstrong Center, a $26 million facility that will greatly expand access to the museum and house the 60,000 items in the Armstrong archive, which had previously been filed away at Queens College. Bringing those materials back to the block will be a game-changer, says the museum's director of research collections Ricky Riccardi.
RICKY RICCARDI: We've had people from around the world come here. They know about the house. They know about the museum. They've taken the tour. They've been to Corona. They don't quite know the archival side. They've never seen the collages. They've never heard the tapes. And so now - the house will always be the gem, the jewel. That will still be No. 1. But now we have the space that we can properly show the archives.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
CHINEN: During a ribbon cutting last week, a brass band led a New Orleans second line to the new building. Inside, guests viewed items on display and checked out a 75-seat performance venue. But even with its state-of-the-art gleam, the center was designed to reflect the light back onto the house that Lucille and Louis Armstrong proudly owned, explains executive director Regina Bain.
REGINA BAIN: It is unlike anything else because no one has lived in that house since they did. And now we have a space to truly prepare people for what they are going to experience when they go across the street.
CHINEN: The first exhibition at the new center was curated by pianist Jason Moran, who relished the chance to dive into the collection and surface new insights.
JASON MORAN: This is like a dream to me, given the stuff that I work on, given how much I love searching someone else's archive, you know? This is a dream to go through Armstrong's archive and all the archives that were also donated to the museum. So it's like this incredible kind of magnet for that kind of preservation.
CHINEN: Moran titled the exhibition "Here To Stay." The phrase is plainspoken but powerful like Armstrong's music. And on this block in Corona, it carries the ring of truth. For NPR News, I'm Nate Chinen.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "WHAT A WONDERFUL WORLD")
LOUIS ARMSTRONG: (Singing) And I think to myself, what a wonderful world. I see skies of blue and clouds of white, the bright, blessed day, the dark, sacred night. And I think to myself, what a wonderful world. The colors of the rainbow so pretty in the sky are also on the faces...
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