Louis "Satchmo" Armstrong

Even his birthday is disputed. He liked to say July 4, 1900, but the date generally believed is August 4, 1901. He grew up poor in the Battlefield, on the southern stretch of Rampart Street. On the last night of 1912 he fired a blank from his stepfather's gun and was sent to the Colored Waif's Home the next day. Peter Davis taught him cornet there and chose him as bandleader, though Bunk Johnson also claimed to have taught him. King Oliver mentored him, and in 1922 Armstrong moved to Chicago to play second cornet in Oliver's band.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Congo Square — steps away
  The 2.35-acre corner of Louis Armstrong Park where, from 1817, New Orleans confined Sunday dancing by enslaved people to one place, and where crowds of hundreds gathered to drum, dance and trade.
• St. Louis Cemetery No. 1 — 0.3 mi
  New Orleans' oldest surviving city of the dead, opened in 1789 after the fire of 1788 and the burial place of Homer Plessy, reachable only on a guided tour since March 2015.
• The Cabildo — 0.4 mi
  The Spanish town hall on Jackson Square, finished in 1799, where Louisiana changed flags in 1803 and where the state Supreme Court sat in the same room until 1910, Plessy v. Ferguson among its cases.
• The Historic New Orleans Collection — 0.4 mi
  A French Quarter museum and research center founded in 1966, whose 2015 Purchased Lives exhibition took on New Orleans' place as the largest slave market in antebellum America.

More markers nearby

• Allison "Big Chief Tootie" Montana — steps away
• Sidney Joseph Bechet — steps away
• First Recording Studio of Cosimo Matassa — steps away
• Mahalia Jackson — steps away