Weather Outside Your Window: Ida destroys home that was influential in Louis Armstrong's childhood

By Monica Danielle, AccuWeather senior producer

Published Sep. 1, 2021 9:57 AM EDT | Updated Sep. 3, 2021 8:26 AM EDT

New Orleans is known for its rich mix of cultures, food and music. However, a piece of the famed jazz history is now a pile of bricks, wood and twisted metal.

When Hurricane Ida hit the city on Sunday, the storm knocked out power, sent floodwaters roaring down streets and ripped apart homes and other structures including an old brick building just a few blocks from the French Quarter.

The Karnofsky Shop sat empty in recent years, but it played an important role in the city's history and was once a hub of family, friends, food and music and was considered a second home to a young Louis Armstrong, long before he became a jazz legend.

In 1913, the building housed the Karnofsky Tailor shop, which was run by a family of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe. The family lived in the apartment upstairs. As a young boy, Armstrong, who lived nearby, was friends with the Karnofskys' five sons and got a job riding on the family's coal wagon, blowing on a "small tin horn" to let people know they were coming.

August 30, 2021; New Orleans, LA. The historic Karnofsky Store on South Rampart Street in New Orleans was a second home to jazz musician Louis Armstrong. Photo credit: Michael DeMocker for USA TODAY NETWORK

This was his first instrument and planted the seeds of his iconic career, musicologist John Baron said in a 1999 interview.

"In Louis Armstrong's biography ... he recalls the Karnofsky family with great pleasure and says ... that he still has matzo in his kitchen because he loved to eat Jewish food at the Karnofskys," Baron said. "The Karnofskys were a tremendous, warm influence in his life. When he was a little older, the family loaned him money to buy his first cornet, a trumpetlike horn, on the condition that he work for them for another year, which he did."

Portrait of jazz great Louis Armstrong taken at the Aquarium in New York, N.Y., circa July 1946. (Library of Congress / William P. Gottlieb)

Although he was baptized a Roman Catholic, Armstrong was often photographed wearing the Star of David, which he wore throughout most of his adult life. As the Accidental Talmudist wrote, he did it to honor the family who showed him such kindness.

“I was only 7 years old but I could easily see the ungodly treatment that the White Folks were handing the poor Jewish family whom I worked for … They were always warm and kind to me, which was very noticeable to me — just a kid who could use a little word of kindness," Armstrong recalled in 1969, according to the Accidental Talmudist.

The Karnofsky shop suffers severe damage after Hurricane Ida pummeled New Orleans with strong winds in Louisiana, U.S., on Aug.30, 2021. (REUTERS/Devika Krishna Kumar)

The building is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Along with other iconic music houses like the Little Gem Saloon, the Iroquois Theater and the Eagle Saloon, it has been described as among "the most important extant landmarks from the first years of jazz" by the New Orleans Times-Picayune. John Hasse, curator of American Music at the Smithsonian Institution, said, “There is probably no other block in America with buildings bearing so much significance to the history of our country’s great art form, jazz.”

Several years ago, there were signs the building might be restored. In 2019, a real estate firm specializing in historical preservation bought part of the Rampart Street block, including the Karnofsky store, and announced plans to restore and repurpose the building to pay homage to its jazz history.

Unfortunately, as these before-and-after Hurricane Ida photos of the Karnofsky building posted to Twitter show, the storm decimated the old building.

Louis Armstrong, the American jazz bandleader, received a triumphant welcome in Dusseldorf, Germany, on Oct. 13, 1952, when he arrived by air from Brussels for a concert tour of Germany. Here, he toots a child's trumpet on Dusseldorf's main street, the well-known Koenigsallee, while his fans listen. His wife Lucille, right, accompanied him on the trip to Europe. (AP Photo/Albert Gillhausen)

(AP Photo/Albert Gillhausen)

While the Karnofsky building may be gone, the defiant spirit of New Orleans lives on and was fittingly embodied on Aug. 29 by a lone trumpeter who played in the city’s deserted French Quarter as Hurricane Ida barreled towards the Big Easy.

Volume 0%

A lone trumpeter played in the street as rain fell from incoming Hurricane Ida on Aug. 29.

Video shot by journalist Phil Lavelle and posted on Twitter shows the man standing in the middle of the typically crowded neighborhood, his defiant trumpet notes mingling with the sounds of intensifying rainfall. Lavelle wrote in the caption, “The music never stops in New Orleans. Not even for a ‘life-altering’ hurricane.”

With celebrated lyrics about the beauty of the world like "I see skies of blue and clouds of white" and "just direct your feet on the sunny side of the street," New Orleans native Louis Armstrong would likely agree.