Back in 2021, Hurricane Ida caused more than $65 billion-worth of damage throughout Louisiana, including the destruction of many century-old buildings in New Orleans. WWNO’s Alana Schreiber paid a visit to one of those buildings that architects are working to restore largely for its contributions to jazz history.
This story has been lightly edited for length and clarity
Alana Schreiber: I'm at 427 South Rampart Street in New Orleans, where the French Quarter meets the Central Business District. I’m in an old building with a sand floor, wooden staircase, and light trickling in. While it is currently in the middle of major renovations, 100 years ago, this building was the Karnofsky tailor shop.
Jason Richards: So, they're a Jewish Lithuanian family. I think by the time they were involved with this building, they were maybe a second-generation New Orleans family.
Schreiber: That's Jason Richards, an architect with Studio West, the company that's been working to redesign the building since 2024. But, this isn’t any old building.
Richards: And obviously, the reason for the historic significance of the building is its connection to Backatown, to the birth of Jazz and Louis Armstrong in particular.
Schreiber: Yes, the Louis Armstrong
Richards: Louis Armstrong got to know the Karnofsky family in particular because they took him in. And he actually shared meals and dinners with the Karnofsky family, and the legend is that he bought his first cornet from the family.
Schreiber: That $5 coronet was thanks to an advance from the Karnofskys on Armstrong’s paycheck. While Armstrong never worked in the tailor shop, he would hop in the family’s horse-drawn wagon to collect junk to sell, alongside the brothers Alex and Morris. And he helped care for the younger Karnofsky kids at night
Jenny West: One of his main influences was that, actually, in the evening they would sing lullabies. Essentially, Yiddish lullabies in the evening.
Schreiber: That's Jenny West, another architect working on the restoration. And Yiddish lullabies actually stayed with Louis Armstrong. He once wrote that the family would sing the song Russian Lullaby as a nightly ritual to put the baby to sleep. Years later, he recorded his own version of the song.
West: That was a huge part of what influenced him to start singing and kind of push his understanding of different musical instruments, essentially.
Schreiber: But the relationship between Louis Armstrong and the Karnofskys didn't end in New Orleans. After Armstrong left, he would always visit the family when he came home. And at the end of his life, when he was in the hospital, he even wrote a memoir, "Louis Armstrong and the Jewish Family in New Orleans, Louisiana, the year of 1907."
And all that history, well, it's in the very bricks that make the old tailor shop. Here's Jenny
West: A lot of what we did in terms of our research was the architectural fabric of the building. Bricks. If you could see that site now, it's kind of an unusual space with a thousand bricks – you know, thousands of bricks really in that yard.
Schreiber: When Studio West first got involved, the original Karnofsky tailor shop bricks were there, but they were scattered on the ground after the building collapsed during Hurricane Ida. Not wanting to get rid of these historic bricks, they picked them up, dusted them off, and used them to construct the new two-story building we're standing in today.
West: So restoring the Karnofsky building, restoring 427 South Rampart, was really important to us to make sure that we could have that piece there left to tell the story when hopefully the entire block is redeveloped.
Schreiber: When the building is complete, West and Richards aren't sure what purpose the space might be used for. But they hope it always serves as a reminder of history.
Richards: It has a huge potential to be a cultural hub for New Orleans and to have a lot of cultural programming there related to jazz music, to history. To the history of both the Jewish community and the black community since they were both there in the same space.
Schreiber: While the construction still has a ways to go, one thing is for sure: both Jason and Jenny agree that the building needs a mezuzah, a small scroll put on door frames of spaces with a Jewish presence. And maybe that mezuzah should have a trumpet on it.
In New Orleans, I'm Alana Schreiber
