Louis Armstrong House Museum

Edification value  3/5
Entertainment value  4/5
Should you go?  4/5
Time spent 82 minutes + 45 minutes at the Louis Armstrong Center (see update below)
Best thing I saw or learned This place feels so real.  It’s like Louis and Lucille Armstrong just left the room to get you an iced tea, and they’ll be back in a jiffy.  Nothing is labeled, no velvet ropes.  The Armstrongs’ iron (or very good facsimile) still sits in their closet. I strongly suspect their air conditioners cool some of the rooms.  More than any other house museum I’ve visited so far, this place still feels like a home.

UPDATE: JUNE 2024

I first visited the Louis Armstrong House in July of 2017. As I mentioned in my 2017 review (below), the Louis Armstrong House had plans to build a new visitor center on a vacant lot across the street from Louis and Lucille’s house. That finally came to fruition in 2023 and so I recently returned to see the Louis Armstrong Center. I also re-took the tour, but rather than rewrite the whole review I’m tacking on this addendum (pre-dendum? fore-dendum?) to say a few words about the new exhibit, and how it goes with the house.

The new building is modern, fit to the low-rise residential neighborhood but with an exuberant glass facade. It houses the Louis Armstrong Archive, and has spaces for performance and instruction (I peeked in on a couple of kids practicing the trumpet), as well as a gift shop. The main thing visitors will care about, though, is an exhibit titled “Here to Stay” that summarizes Louis Armstrong’s life and times through selected artifacts and video and audio clips. This replaces the small exhibit in the former Armstrong rec room that I describe in the original review. 

“Here to Stay” includes sections with titles like “Roots,” “Tools,” “Ambassador,” and “On Film.” Each display combines some artifacts and photos and wall texts telling the relevant story. Most surprising to me was a section called “Armstrong the Artist.” I mean, obviously he was one of the greatest artists of all time. But this section refers to Louis Armstrong as a visual artist. He made collages, in both scrapbooks and on the covers of the hundreds of reel-to-reel tapes he recorded. Is collage the visual arts equivalent to jazz? Maybe. Taking bits and pieces, remixing and matching them, putting them into surprising new orders, improvisationally. It makes sense, and showed me a side to Armstrong I had no idea about before.

Louis Armstrong's OTHER art, collage (on tape cases)

Interactive table at Louis Armstrong CenterThe exhibit also features an circular interactive table with multiple touchscreens. This gadget, designed to look like a record, that lets visitors explore in huge detail Louis Armstrong’s music, his collaborations with other artists, his travels, his life and the neighborhood, and more, all with stills, video, and audio. You could spend a long time exploring there.

The opening of the Louis Armstrong Center has provided a welcome opportunity to re-visit both the Armstrong’s house and my original review of it from seven years (!) ago.

In the years since my first visit, my love of the place has only grown. Whenever someone asks me for examples of unusual New York museums they should visit, it’s near the top of my list. And I regularly refer to it as my favorite house museum in New York. The addition of the new Louis Armstrong Center only strengthens the overall experience. I’m really glad they didn’t try to change the house itself to pack in more museum-type bits. So I’m taking advantage of this addendum to update my former rating (it was 3-4-4 before). This is absolutely one of the best museums in New York City, a wonderful tribute to a wonderful pair of people, and everyone should go.

With that, I’ll pass you off to Joe from seven years ago to give hist impressions of the house part of the Louis Armstrong House, dating from June of 2017. Having just taken the tour again, I can vouch for it being just as good this time around. You still can’t take pictures inside, though.

ORIGINAL POST: JUNE, 2017

A riddle:  If Louis Armstrong were a superhero (and I’m not saying he wasn’t), what would he call his souped up vehicle for patrolling the streets of Gotham?

A:  The SATCHMOBILE.

Actually the Satchmobile is the name of the official van of the Louis Armstrong House Museum.

Satchmobile, Louis Armstrong House Museum, Queens
Quick, Dizzy, to the Satchmobile!

Louis Armstrong practically invented jazz.  He played all over the world, made a bajillion records, sang songs that everyone knows. And when he wasn’t doing all that, from 1943 until the day he died he and his wife Lucille lived in a modest three-story brick house in the Corona area of Queens.  They entertained generations of neighborhood kids, Louis made tape recordings of himself (he was sort of a tape diarist), and generally lived far more quietly than you’d expect from a jazz superhero.

Louis Armstrong House Museum, Corona, Queens

Louis Armstrong died in 1971.  Lucille lived for another 12 years, until 1983.  They never had kids.  And the house, pretty much exactly as it was when Lucille died, passed into the hands of the city.  Queens College manages the place, and they lovingly restored and opened it in 2003 as the best house museum I’ve seen so far.

You can only enter the house on guided tours, but my gods, it feels just like you’re visiting the Armstrongs. The group (nine people joined my tour on a random Saturday afternoon) goes right up the front steps, rings the musical door chime, and proceeds on their visit, which explores every room in the house, down to the breakfast nook.

Louis Armstrong House Museum, Queens, New York

The House

The management frowns on photos.  I cheated once, to take a picture of Louis Armstrong’s infinitely mirrored bathroom. I wondered if Yayoi Kusama ever visited the Armstrongs.  Or took this tour…

Bathroom, Louis Armstrong House Museum, Queens

Here are some of the things I managed to resist photographing:

  • Louis’s wood paneled den with its fabulous bar (there is still alcohol in his bar.  Drambuie.) and fabulous reel-to-reel tape recorders.
  • The Armstrongs’ bedroom with its wild silver wallpaper.
  • The amazing 50s kitchen.  Bright blue, enameled, curvy cabinetry, custom sub-zero fridge, everything built in.  Paper towels stored in their own wall cubby. They even had a blender built into their countertop.  Lucille and her kitchen designer were geniuses!
  • Their white upright piano, which neither of them could play, but looked good in the living room.
  • Four green ashtrays shaped like the suits from a deck of cards.
  • Art from a lifetime of world travels.
  • Okay, I wanted to take pictures of everything.

But I could not resist the bathroom.  I apologize, Louis Armstrong House Museum folks.  

The Louis Armstrong House uses sound, but unexpectedly it doesn’t play a lot of music.  Rather, during the tour, the guide periodically plays bits of recordings of Armstrong talking about the house and his life.  In his den, there’s a portrait of him by Tony Bennett (!), and Louis talks about that–how he signed it “Benedetto.”  Letting the man speak for himself in his own home works incredibly well.

A Few Other Things

Louis Armstrong House
The gift shop’s in Louis Armstrong’s garage

The entry to the Louis Armstrong House and its gift shop is in their former garage.

From the garage you proceed to a small exhibit area, in what used to be his rec room.  Where he played poker with Dizzy Gillespie.  (His poker table is on display upstairs.) I like to think of it as the Satch-cave. 

Look at these stairs!  And the wallpaper!

Exhibit Room, with inevitable brief DVD introduction

Currently there’s a display commemorating the 50th anniversary of the inescapable, somewhat saccharin (to my taste) “What a Wonderful World.”  Not a hit when first released, the film “Good Morning Vietnam” rediscovered the song and set it on its path toward ubiquity.  But Louis said whenever he sang it, it reminded him of Corona.

You can also see Armstrong’s bathrobe and slippers, life mask, and suitcases.  And one of his trumpets.  And three pages he wrote about his joy living in the neighborhood.  I got the sense that even if someone had offered them, say, Andrew Carnegie’s mansion, he and Lucille would’ve stayed right where they were.

Koi pond, Louis Armstrong HouseThe most unexpected thing about the house is the Armstrongs bought the lot next door and made it into an expansive garden, with  pine trees, a little lawn, a tiny koi pond, and a bar and barbecue.  In this one place, I felt a legendary musician exerting some star power. They only built the garden in 1970, so just a year before Armstrong died.  Better late than never.

Garden, Louis Armstrong House

I sat there for a while playing in my head what I’ll get to say when someone asks me what I was up to today.  “Oh, not much.  Sat in Louis Armstrong’s garden reading a magazine for a bit.”

Changes Coming

Louis Armstrong House
New interpretive center coming soon…

The Louis Armstrong House experience will soon change significantly.   A vacant lot across the street (where they currently park the Satchmobile) is going to get a spiffy new building that will greatly increase the museum’s ability to tell Louis and Lucille’s story.  I think that’s wonderful — though I wonder if the neighbors on this quiet block agree. 

But even as they’re able to show off more of their collection, I sincerely hope that the house stays just exactly the way it is.  It is an amazing monument to the talent, humility, and soul of one of the great figures in the history of music.

You can build museums to jazz (not saying you can succeed, but you can try).  You can memorialize great concert performances in museum form. You can  digitize music and tell its story through touchscreens and headphones.  But nothing you can possibly do will bring you closer to Louis Armstrong than visiting his house in Corona, Queens.

Meanwhile, somebody please write a Justice League-style comic book featuring the Superheroes of Jazz battling the forces of squareness.

Trumpet, Louis Armstrong House
Steiner trumpet, gift to Armstrong from King George V, July 1934.

For Reference:

Address 34-56 107th Street, Flushing, Queens
Website louisarmstronghouse.org
Cost  General Admission:  $10, with tour

The Frick Madison

Edification value
Entertainment value
Should you go?
Time spent 210 minutes
Best thing I saw or learned Bellini’s wonderful St. Francis in the Desert now has a room to itself, angled to one of the Breuer’s weird, skewed windows such that the light hits it exactly the way the light in the painting works. It’s like Bellini knew back in the 1470s that someday this room would exist, or like Breuer knew someday this painting would be in this spot. It gave me chills. Also, St. Francis in the Desert has one of the best oblivious donkeys in all of art.

Have you ever had a dear old friend, tell you that they planned to change up their entire look? Style, hair, clothes, the way they present themselves…the whole shebang. Have you ever worried that, even though you know they’ll be the same person underneath the superficial changes, you might like them… less? Maybe tried to talk them out of it? “You’re awesome just as you are! Don’t go changing!”

This has never happened to me with a person, but it’s very much how I reacted when the Frick Collection announced that while Stately Frick Manor is closed for a major renovation and expansion, Mr. Frick’s art would be on view in Marcel Breuer’s Brutalist building, originally home to the Whitney and lately venue for the Met’s experimental, defunct Met Breuer effort.

There’s no overstating the magnitude of the change, the cognitive shock of Henry Clay Frick’s lovely, genteel, incredibly tasteful collection of masterpieces recontextualized out of the home that’s been its home for over a century, and re-installed in one of the least friendly buildings in New York City. 

I feel like I should hate it. To be brutal(ist)ly honest, I wanted to hate it.

I loved it.

Possibly this is because it was my first art museum visit in 4 months. Maybe I was just starved for art…maybe you could’ve showed me anything and I would’ve gone into raptures. But I don’t think so.

Space: The Final Frontier

The clearest benefit of the move to the Breuer building is a ton of square footage to play with. I wonder if the Frick curators toyed with the idea of keeping everything more or less “where it was” — recreating the mansion’s rooms in the Breuer space. Like what they did with the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia. That would have been a terrible idea. Probably.

Instead, for the first time ever, the Frick collection is arranged chronologically and thematically. That sort of pedagogy is out of fashion in museums and seems very retro, but it makes tons of sense, and it feels new, because we’ve never been able to see this art this way before.

For example, the Vermeers are in one place, creating arguably the best single roomful of art in New York City (prove me wrong!). Holbein’s Thomas Cromwell and Thomas More now glare eye to eye, no fireplace or stern St. Jerome separating them. I never realized how many Van Dycks the Frick Collection had til I saw them all in one place.

The extra space also creates more breathing room between pieces. As a result, there’s less sensory overload, and so more ability to focus. Works that were second-tier Frick treasures get attention, and the Frick’s best pieces get showcased in ways the mansion doesn’t allow.

What’s more, things that were perviously part of the scenery — the porcelains, the bronzes, the carpets — now get spotlights, literally, thrown on them. The porcelain room is a particular delight, and its very contemporary design made me stop and pay attention to those pieces in a way I never have before.

The other remarkable change is you can get closer to some pieces now, and the heights and sight lines are different. It’s a literal shift of perspective. To wit, I’ve never been a fan of the froufrou Fragonard room with its insipid cherubs. It’s still definitely not my fave, but seeing its panels anew on Madison, rearranged, I realized that at least some of those cherubs are violent. And therefore a little edgy.

What’s Stayed The Same

In terms of things that haven’t changed, the Frick has retained its no-photos policy. While I deeply respect that, this is an utterly photogenic, super-Instagrammable experience. Visitors will be tempted!

Also, The Frick’s retained its no-wall-text philosophy. You can pick up a free guide, or download a reasonably good Bloomberg-sponsored app, but if you want, it can be just you and the art. I admire that.

A Whole New World

The best art makes you see the world in a new way, and the best museums make you see art in a new way. However, for a place like the Frick, there are few opportunities (outside of their jewel-box special exhibitions) to let people see the collection anew. That’s okay when you’re as perfect as the Frick. But perfection breeds inertia, and a resistance to innovate. It takes some doing to overcome that.

I’m surprised at how pithy my original, 2017 Frick review is. But it says what it needed to say: Everyone needs to go to the Frick. And I wish it would never change.

The Frick Madison forces me to rethink part of that conclusion. Everyone definitely needs to go to the Frick Madison, most especially people who know and love the original. And I stand happily corrected about the “never change” part. I can’t wait to go back.

For Reference:

Address 945 Madison Avenue, Manhattan
Website https://www.frick.org/
Cost  General Admission:  $22. Advance tickets required
Other Relevant Links
  • Details on the Frick building project are here.

 

Museum of Modern Art

Edification value  
Entertainment value  
Should you go?  
Time spent 221 minutes (3 hours, 41 minutes)
Best thing I saw or learned It’s nigh impossible to pick a “best” at MoMA. But I feel a special love for Mark Rothko’s melancholy, soothing No. 16 (Red, Brown, and Black) from 1958. 

Museum of Modern Art, New York

UPDATE APRIL 2021: This review is obsolete, as it was written before MoMA opened its most recent expansion (which I talk about a bit in the review below). I will hopefully publish an updated review…soon. A lot of my take from a few years ago is still pertinent.

The walls at the Museum of Modern Art don’t meet the floors. It’s a minuscule  detail. I feel certain many visitors don’t even consciously notice it. I’m not sure why the architect did that. But think about the words that describe the collection:  “groundbreaking,” “earth-shattering.”  I like to think they decided MoMA’s treasures are too wonderful to touch something as mundane as a floor. So the art, and the walls on which the art is hung, don’t.

More mundanely, I also wonder whether (and how) they dust all those wall-floor cracks. Continue reading “Museum of Modern Art”

Wyckoff House Museum

 

Edification value 3/5
Entertainment value 3/5
Should you go?  
Time spent 61 minutes
Best thing I saw or learned Wyckoff family members lived in the Wyckoff House right through the start of the 1900s.  250 years of family history in a single domicile boggles my mind.

Before starting my project, I never realized how many historic houses exist in modern New York.  Some surprisingly old. Manhattan’s oldest, the Morris-Jumel Mansion, dates from the 1760s. The Van Cortlandt House in the Bronx was built in 1748.  Bowne House in Queens dates to the 1660s.  But in any city, there can be only one oldest house. In New York that is the Wyckoff House, located in the prosaically named Flatlands, a nondescript part of Brooklyn far from any subway line.

Wyckoff House, Canarsie, Brooklyn

And so, on the first snowy day of the year, I made my trek, over the river and through the woods, half-metaphorically and half-literally, to the Wyckoffs’ ancestral home. Continue reading “Wyckoff House Museum”

Lower East Side Tenement Museum

 

Edification value 4/5
Entertainment value
Should you go?  4/5
Time spent 109 minutes
Best thing I saw or learned My favorite fun fact from the tour is that the Lower East Side got the moniker “Klein Deutschland” before there even was a unified “Deutschland.”

There are certain combinations of places and architecture that just go together.  Paris+garret; Newport+mansion; San Francisco+Victorian ; Brooklyn+brownstone.  And “Lower East Side+tenement.”  It’s almost redundant to call a place the “Lower East Side Tenement Museum.”  But New York has one of those, and redundant or not, it is a fantastic, unforgettable recreation of a slice of life in this city.

Tenement Museum

How the Other Half Lived

The word “tenement” originally referred to any multiple dwelling building, what we’d call an “apartment” today.  Very quickly, however, “tenement” came to mean a very particular type of multiple dwelling building.  One aimed at the working class and recent immigrants, crammed with people and with very limited light, ventilation, and amenities.

Like how non-New Yorkers imagine New Yorkers live today, only even worse. Continue reading “Lower East Side Tenement Museum”

Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine

Edification value  
Entertainment value  4/5
Should you go?  
Time spent 58 minutes (most recently)
Best thing I saw or learned A vertical tour brings you up close to the engineering of an old-school cathedral.  The building is buttressed to support the weight of an enormous tower that was never built.  

Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine
Above the ceiling…

To balance that buttressing, there’s literally tons of lead above the ceiling vaults, pushing down and out as the buttresses push in.

Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine

Although I have rarely attended a service there, the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine has figured large in my life in New York City.

Shortly after I arrived as a freshman at Columbia, I attended an event at the Cathedral.  The Dalai Lama spoke, as did the daughter of Desmond Tutu.  I vividly remember it was right around Rosh Hashanah, and a group of monks offered a chant in honor of the High Holy Days. Tibetan Buddhist monks singing in honor of the Jewish new year in the largest Christian cathedral in the world.  To this day, that stands as one of my quintessential New York experiences. Continue reading “Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine”

Wave Hill

Edification value  
Entertainment value  
Should you go?  
Time spent 114 minutes
Best thing I saw or learned Rather than the grounds or the view I decided to limit myself to the “Call and Response” exhibit.  Steven Millar’s “Many-Eyed Object,” 2017, is wood and glass, constructed and organic, and all about changing vistas and views.  

Wave Hill, Riverdale, the Bronx
Steven Millar, “Many-Eyed Object,” 2017

In that, it neatly summarizes Wave Hill as a whole.

For the first time since I started this project, I feel the need for absolution.

“Forgive me, City, for I have sinned.”

“My son, how long has it been since your last confession?”

“Well, Bloomberg was in office, so it’s been a while…”

“What did you do?”

“It’s not a sin of commission, but a sin of omission.  I confess that it has been twenty-three years since I last paid a visit to Wave Hill.”

What the Heck is Wave Hill?

Wave Hill, Riverdale, the Bronx

Wave Hill is difficult to describe.  

I mean, partly it’s easy:

Two fancy old mansions and associated outbuildings and landscaping across 28 acres of surrounding land, on a bluff in Riverdale in the Bronx, overlooking the Hudson and the majestic cliffs of the Palisades in New Jersey, now used as a venue for contemporary art.

So it’s a hybrid art museum, botanic garden, and historic home.  Cut and dried.

Continue reading “Wave Hill”

Intrepid Sea, Air, and Space Museum

Edification value  4/5
Entertainment value  4/5
Should you go?  
Time spent 150 minutes, including 26 queued to get in. I could easily have spent more (inside, that is).
Best thing I saw or learned Concorde, Intrepid Museum, New York

For all those who think technology progresses in only one direction, Intrepid offers a few counterfactuals, but none better than Concorde.  From 1976 until 2003, people (very few, and very rich to be sure) jetted across the Atlantic in under 3.5 hours.  I hope we see supersonic travel again in my lifetime.  But I doubt it.

Intrepid Air Sea Space Museum New YorkDriving up the west side of Manhattan helps New Yorkers exercise our jadedness.  Here’s my routine with out-of-towners. 

  • Oh, the Renzo Piano Whitney building.  I was just there the other day. 
  • Hmph, High Line.  Too crowded with tourists. 
  • Frank Gehry’s IAC Building is really showing its age, isn’t it?
  • I can sometimes be bothered to look up from my smartphone at midtown’s forest of skyscrapers.
  • Hudson Yards, a whole new city within the city, is an inconvenient and messy construction zone. 
  • And that over there?  Oh, that’s just our aircraft carrier.

I can act the part. But, oh, the Intrepid. I’m still a kid at heart. I love boats and planes and exploding things. And the Intrepid has all of that, including a Concorde, a nuclear submarine, and even a (sort of) space shuttle. I love that we’ve got an aircraft carrier, just parked next to Manhattan like its crew dropped by to see a show or go shopping on Canal Street.

As I’ve observed, New York has a glut of art museums and far too few science museums.  Intrepid is one of the latter, with a good dose of history to boot.  Partly due to supply and demand, then, there can be long lines. And it gets away with charging a hefty entrance fee.  Still, it’s worth it. Continue reading “Intrepid Sea, Air, and Space Museum”

Rubin Museum of Art

Edification value  
Entertainment value  3/5
Should you go?  
Time spent 203 minutes (including a leisurely supper)
Best thing I saw or learned Tibetan Buddhism has a macabre streak a mile wide, and I find it deeply endearing. They make bowls out of skulls and trumpets out of human leg bones.  Perhaps not for everyone, but I consider that a healthy attitude toward mortality. What goth (or goth sympathizer) wouldn’t love the idea of dancing in the charnel fields with the Lords of the Cremation Grounds?

Rubin Museum of Art, Manhattan

Update: Feb 17, 2024: I’m very sad to learn that the Rubin Museum of Art is closing down as of October, 2024. As you can tell from this review, I love the Rubin, and will be sorry to see it go, or as they euphemistically put it become “a museum without walls.” Uh huh. Well, Buddhism is nothing if not about cycles, perhaps a future wall-bound incarnation will return someday. In the meantime, New York will be poorer for the loss — go while you can! 

New York’s museums house themselves in a wide variety of repurposed spaces. Disused armories, synagogues, navy yards, customs houses, aircraft carriers, robber-baron mansions (galore), activist storefronts… nearly anything can be transformed into a museum with sufficient effort of will (and money).

But I believe only one museum in the city exists in a former department store. The old Barney’s, on 17th Street near Seventh Avenue, is now the home of the Rubin Museum of Art. It’s audacious that a former home of high-end fashion retail now teaches people about Tibetan Buddhism and related Himalayan cultures. Both rarefied atmospheres in their own ways, but that’s the only thing they have in common.

The Rubin, though, stands as a supremely successful museum conversion. It offers seven floors of exhibit space, a far better restaurant than you’d expect, and (hearkening back to the DNA of the building) a lovely little gift shop full of Buddhist and New Agey treasures (but sadly no leg bone trumpets).

Continue reading “Rubin Museum of Art”

Whitney Museum of American Art

Edification value  4/5
Entertainment value  
Should you go?  
Time spent 176 minutes
Best thing I saw or learned Charles Demuth and Elsie Driggs Juxtaposed at the Whitney MuseumA juxtaposition of two pieces: My Egypt, by Charles Demuth, and Pittsburgh, by Elsie Driggs. Both from 1927, they present similar and yet extremely divergent visions of industrialized landscapes.  One is clearly prettier than the other, and yet, as Driggs said of her grey smokestacks and pipes, “This shouldn’t be beautiful. But it is.”

The Met’s Worst Mistake?

The Whitney Museum of American Art.  Yet another art museum in our saturated city. Why does it exist?  Mainly because the Met in the late 1920s didn’t care to own a vast collection of work by living American artists.  Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney had offered the Met her collection, with an endowment, even.  Yes, the Met’s Board wouldn’t take the art even though they stood to get paid to do so.

It reminds me of the scene in the movie “Pretty Woman” where Julia Roberts gets treated miserably by the snooty store lady on Rodeo Drive, only to return later looking fabulous to point out what a humongous mistake said snooty lady had made.  Which raises the question, which museum is Richard Gere? 

Anyway, I will say that if any member of the Whitney family now or in the future offers to pay me to take, say, a Hopper or a Rothko, I will gladly accept that offer.

Continue reading “Whitney Museum of American Art”