Louis Armstrong Park honors the man who took the musical tradition of Congo Square and carried it to the world. Louis Armstrong was born in New Orleans in 1901, in the neighborhood known as the Back of Town, not far from here, in the kind of poverty that the city concentrated in its Black neighborhoods with brutal efficiency. He grew up surrounded by the street music of New Orleans — the brass bands that played funerals and parades, the honky-tonk clubs of Storyville, the church music of the Baptist and Baptist-inflected congregations.
He learned cornet in a reform school after being arrested for firing a pistol on New Year's Eve, and by his early twenties he was playing with the hottest bands in the city. He left for Chicago in 1922, then New York, then the world, but he never stopped calling New Orleans home, and New Orleans never stopped claiming him. Armstrong's innovations — the expanded range of the trumpet, the vocabulary of jazz improvisation, the transformation of popular song into an art form — shaped the entire twentieth century of American music.
The park features a large bronze statue of Armstrong with his trumpet, surrounded by the lagoons and live oaks of the Tremé. The Congo Square marker within the park connects his genius to its roots.