Queens Field Trip

Corona, not screaming!

Thom and I toured the home of Louis Armstrong where he resided with his fourth wife, Lucille Wilson, from 1943 until his death in 1971.

No photos were allowed inside the very colorful interior, exactly as Lucille, a former Cotton Club singer, left it when she died more than a decade later.

Though the couple had no children of their own, they were beloved by the neighborhood kids.

The Louis Armstrong Center, across the street, opened only in 2023.  It's just the right size.

Other than glancing at magazine profiles, watching Armstrong co-star with Barbra Streisand in Hello, Dolly! and seeing him blow his trumpet on "The Ed Sullivan Show," everything I knew about Satchmo came from A Wonderful World, a musical based on his life.  "People here who saw it praised the music and the dancing but thought too much of the story was exaggerated," said our guide, a professional saxophonist with a deep love of jazz.  They should know:  Armstrong recorded his legacy on more than 900 reel-to-reel audio tapes, now digitized.  Visitors to the house are treated to excerpts of his voice speaking on a variety of subjects, and playing some music.

April 15, 1966

In spite of his love for his wife and home, America's Jazz Ambassador toured 300 days of the year, visiting a total of 65 countries during his lifetime.  He carried a suitcase engraved with his nickname, "Satchmo."  

This trumpet, which Lucille had bronzed for Armstrong's headstone, was so often an object of attempted theft that Lucille had it replaced with plaster in Flushing Cemetery.  I'll have to visit Louis there.

The second part of our field trip required walking half an hour to the Queens Museum, built as an ice skating rink (Thom remembered) for the 1964 World's Fair.  We went to see his nephew's contribution to "Umber Majeed J😊Y TECH," a not-easily-described (or understood) exhibit that explores the Pakistan pavilion at same World's Fair from the perspective of the contemporary diaspora.

The artist, a thirty-something woman, hired Jimmy to produce the three-dimensional animation, including these "pink pearls," although I think it's probably not cool to identify them that way any longer.

Another exhibit with allusions to the '64 Worlds Fair resonated more with this baby boomer. In fact, I had just mentioned the work that inspired it to our guide earlier when he mentioned the event had celebrated "Louis Armstrong Day" on June 30 after the trumpeter finally dislodged the Beatles' "I Wanna Hold Your Hand" from the top of the charts with "Hello, Dolly" his most popular recording ever.  A seminal moment in pop culture, it signaled the squares (i.e. the fair organizers) weren't entirely done for, not yet.  They also rejected 13 Most Wanted Men, the mural Andy Warhol had been commissioned to create.  Governor Nelson Rockefeller feared it would offend one of his his important constituencies because so many of the criminals' last names were Italian!

"America's Most Help Wanted (After Warhol)" by Abang-guard (2025)

The Filipino artistic collective is getting a lot of contemporary mileage spoofing the work of old white male artists.

"Corazon Amurao In Window (After Lichtenstein)"
by Abang-guard (2025)

What I mistook to be whale bone scrimshaw turned out to be buffalo bone, carved by a contemporary indigenous artists whose name I regretfully forgot to capture.  Such incredible detail.

Speaking of incredible detail, we also checked out "The Panorama of the City of New York On Long-Term View," billed as a "helicopter ride over New York's five boroughs" when it was constructed for the '64 World's Fair, and updated (with more than 60,000 buildings replaced!) for the opening of the Queens Museum in 1994.  It's the only exhibit in the place that makes adequate use of the building's cavernous space which definitely could use a re-imagining.

While some more recent landmarks have been added to the scale 3D map on a piecemeal basis (including Citi Field and Yankee Stadium), other extraordinary historical changes are not reflected. Oddly, 27 buildings in Battery Park City were replaced without elaboration in the descriptive text while the Twin Towers remain standing.  No doubt that's a lose/lose situation for museum's administration.  Better not to have adopted the piecemeal strategy IMHO.

More than 15 years ago, the museum launched an "Adopt-the Building" campaign to raise funds for another city-wide renovation.  After celebrating my 47th year in 47 Pianos (circled in red below on the left) this month, I can buy a year-long lease on the property for $100, about 12 times less than I'm currently paying in monthly rent!!!!!

Florenzer (4*)

When I picked up Phil Melanson's queer historical novel about Leonardo da Vinci, I figured the title referred to a native of Florence, where I'd just spent four days.  Wrong!

Go to the Hapsburg court up in the Alps and ask someone how to say sodomite. Florenzer, they’ll tell you. 

Such actions aren’t confined within the walls of Florence, of course. Sodomy exists anywhere there are men with cocks and men with holes. Which is everywhere, really, except for the convents—and there the nuns have their own methods. But does anyone condone it? Certainly not. These are Christian lands. 

Apparently some critics have complained about the liberties Melanson has taken in imagining the specifics of da Vinci's sexual orientation, but they rang so true that I immediately searched the internet for an incomplete portrait of Saint Sebastian (one of my photographic obsessions) to 1) find out if it existed and 2) to see what Leonardo's boyfriend, the model, looked like (in fact, the real da Vinci drew an incomplete sketch).

Iac may never have lived, but Melanson employs him less a real person than a symbol of forbidden first love, the kind that cuts deepest.  The reader sees the character only through Leonardo's eyes, as a young prostitute who aspires to gold smithing when the city they inhabit is known throughout the world for the beauty that it produces. 

Melanson makes the Saint Sebastian metaphor work overtime.  Near the novel's end, Leonardo's father reveals his heretofore unexpressed disgust with his illegitimate son's homosexuality, cataloging all the signs that have been evident since childhood.

He [Leonardo] is Sebastian, struck with arrows, one by one. 

The rupture affords Leonardo a Renaissance way of "coming out."  With nothing left to lose (he previously has been arrested for sodomy and briefly imprisoned, an experience so traumatic that it induces both celibacy and artistic inertia), he can refuse a commission from Lorenzo Medici, the ruler of the Republic of Florence, whose story, told in parallel, provides Melanson with a fruitful opportunity to explore the competing power centers of the era, and free Leonardo to become arguably the world's most famous painter.

Although the easily-consumed Florenzer bears a strong resemblance to a screenplay, particularly in a tripartite narrative structure that relies on cross cutting--Melanson worked in film marketing before writing this, his first novel--there's much that sticks, including deft portraits of Lucrezia, Lorenzo Medici's wise but conniving mother, and Francesco Salviati, an embittered priest in service to a corrupt pope who favors his "nephews" when assigning plum bishoprics.

If Melanson is less convincing in his depiction of Lorenzo Medic that may reflect an unfamiliarity--or lack of sympathy--with a heterosexual point of view if not the historical record which he claims to have followed accurately.  Miserable and unattractive, especially in contrast to his handsome, happy-go-lucky brother who recognizes da Vinci's talent and yearns to marry outside his class, Lorenzo both relies on and resents his mother to the exclusion of nearly all other relationships.  This dynamic seems improbable in a society as patriarchal as Italy's was at the time and remained until the end of the last century.  Unlike the man who relied only on his skill and imagination for his life's work, Lorenzo, who died at 43 (the same year that Columbus didn't discover America) had a lot on his plate.

"Portrait of Lorenzo de' Medici" by Giorgio Vasari (1534)

In the appealing but anachronistic world of Florenzer, only one of them gets a happy ending.