LOUIS ARMSTRONG
Louis Armstrong was born in a modest wooden house on August 4, 1901 on a street known as Jane Alley. (Armstrong insisted that the real name was James Alley, not Jane Alley.) While Armstrong tended to wax nostalgically about his times in New Orleans, he was often disrespected in here, even after he became an international superstar. In 1964, the city of New Orleans elected to demolish his boyhood home and others around it to make way for the New Orleans Traffic Court and police headquarters. That was but one of many examples of the city choosing to demolish important jazz landmarks rather than honor the physical legacy of the city’s signature sonic expression. (Note, this story is slightly more complicated, but all the more gut wrenching than it appears on the surface. The contractor tore down the neighborhood, but left Armstrong’s house untouched. The plan was for a jazz organization to move the home to a safe place. When they arrived the next day, they found someone had burned the house down.)
The Faubourg Treme neighborhood, long a center of New Orleans Afro-Creole culture, was deemed an appropriate place to create public park modeled after Tivoli Gardens in the Netherlands. As historian Lawrence Powell wrote in January 17, 2012 issue of “Southern Spaces,” “There’s been a more or less constant whirligig of contention involving Uptown white elites, a newly-aroused Tremé community, and antagonistic pro-growth factions of Afro-Creole politicians. They have fought about park management and drawn swords over whether a Tivoli-like paid-admission amusement venue should be allowed in.” New Orleans Mayor de Lesseps “Chep” Morrison, a staunch segregationist, envisioned creating a Lincoln Center like entertainment complex in Congo Square. Under his successor, Victor Schiro, dozens of homes and other structures were demolished. “I remember when they knocked it over, the late ”Tom Stagg told Gallivan Burwell for an article in 2005 in Where Y’at.” It only took about three days. I never saw so many bulldozers in my life.” The Tivoli-like facility that the city fathers envisioned never came to fruition. Though with the opening of the Theater for Performing Arts in 1973, Congo Square had its second performance venue and in that way approximated the early vision of a complex of entertainment facilities parallel to the Lincoln Center Complex in New York.
Shortly after he was elected mayor of the city, Moon Landrieu was faced with a tragedy and an opportunity.
In New York, Louis Armstrong had died and in New Orleans, Beauregard Square had never been developed. The Citizens Committee for a Memorial to Louis Armstrong, co-chaired by Juvenile Court Judge Dutch Morial and States-Item editor Charles Ferguson, recommended that the Mayor create a memorial park on the site of the square. In 1969, Louis and Lucille Armstrong created the Louis Armstrong Educational Foundation because, as Louis put it, “I want to give back some of the goodness I received.” When the time to create the park in honor of Louis, Lucille was a consistent champion of the idea and wrote letters to the Mayor expressing her opinion of the developments. Specifically, she wrote in support of the idea that the New Orleans Center for Creative Arts (NOCCA), a public, arts high school, be housed in the old McDonough No. 41 school building which was located on the grounds of the park. “Louis would have been pleased to know that the park would have a facility for high school students because of the opportunities it would afford the youth,” she wrote in a letter to Mayor Landrieu. “He felt the hope of the world was in the youth and would have liked them to have the advantages he didn’t have as he was growing up.” Ultimately, NOCCA was housed in another old school building uptown on Perrier Street.
The park, as envisioned, was quite elegant. Stone pavers were arranged in circles to echo the circular group dances historically performed in Congo Square. There were fountains, a faux lagoon over which short bridges were constructed and heirloom rose bushes. Historic buildings that survived the Treme demolition were incorporated among the park’s featured attractions. Other buildings, constructed during or shortly after the heyday of Congo Square, were moved to the park to lend an added feeling of historical heft. In 1976, Elizabeth Catlett, the famed sculptor and graphic artist, was commissioned to create a 10-foot, bronze statue of Armstrong for the park.