Louis Armstrong’s Birthplace

In the plaza of the New Orleans Traffic Court and police headquarters, a historical marker designates the site of the modest wooden house where Louis Armstrong was born on August 4, 1901 (not, as he was known to claim, on July 4, 1900). In 1964, to make way for the court and police complex, the city demolished Armstrong’s home and everything else on what used to be a street called Jane Alley. Armstrong described the street (also known as Jane’s Alley or James Alley) in his autobiography Satchmo My Life in New Orleans:

James Alley—not Jane Alley as some people call it—lies in the heart of what is called The Battlefield because the toughest characters in town used to live there, and would shoot and fight so much. In that one block between Gravier and Perdido, more people were crowded than you ever saw in your life. There were church people, gamblers, hustlers, cheap pimps, thieves, prostitutes, and lots of children. There were bars, honky-tonks, and saloons, and lots of women walking the streets for tricks to take to their “pads”as they called their rooms.

He later moved to Perdido Street in the area known as Black Storyville, on the same block as Funky Butt Hall. He was just around the corner from the 400 block of South Rampart Street, where several early jazz landmarks still stand today.