House-Museum, Louis Armstrong does not look like the home of international celebrities - a small and modest, it does not stand out on the streets of Queens. Great jazz trumpeter and singer lived here for almost three decades. Everything here looks exactly as in the life of a musician.

The grandson of a slave, Armstrong was born in New Orleans, he spent his childhood in poverty (his father abandoned the family, his mother earned in prostitution). In the eleven years he sang in the street quartet of boys. At thirteen - I played the cornet in the ballroom. In the twenty began solo trumpet, soon he played in a jazz band in Chicago. Already a successful jazz musician he performed in New York, Los Angeles and Chicago. In 1943, he settled with his fourth wife, Lucille in Queens, on a tree-lined side street, in the building of red brick.

One of the greatest jazz musicians of the world, Armstrong could afford a rich home anywhere, but settled here in the area of ​​the Crown, which since ancient times settled immigrants. However, so did the famous jazz musicians Ella Fitzgerald, Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Shayvers Norman Marr. The streets of the Crown do not look like Manhattan: houses here are small, they abut tiny gardens - Village village. However, Armstrong loved this place and was not going to go anywhere.

Outside, the house looks very modest, but inside the musician gave everything as required soul. Glossy blue kitchen unit is equipped with a variety of techniques: a huge stove, made by special order, built right into the kitchen countertop processor (such were already in the sixties of the XX century). A native of the south, Armstrong loved traditional southern dishes such as red beans and rice. When he still only cared for Severyanka Lucille, then in any case he asked whether she knows how to cook this dish - she said that to learn (and at the first meeting with the parents of Louis Lucille really served red beans and rice). Museum frankly talks about some of the features of the home owner: Armstrong day goes by without a laxative Swiss firm Kriss, and without embarrassment, he advised it to everyone. One day - even members of the British royal family.

Walking through the house, visitors can hear the Armstrong rehearses on his pipe, risky jokes with Lucille sings. The museum's collection - hundreds of reels of tape of home recordings and studio musician, thousands of photographs, documents and letters. This amount of documents is not surprising: Armstrong loved conversation, spent every free minute at the letters to his wife and friends.

Here - the five pipes, of which removed the magical sounds of the musician, fourteen mouthpieces to him, more than a hundred different awards. Near the house - a small garden, which celebrated its seventy-first birthday Armstrong. It was his last birthday.