The Little Gem Saloon was Frank Deroux’s first tavern on the 400 block of South Rampart Street and also featured early jazz musicians. Later a “loan office” (pawn shop) was here, and after that a bar called Pete’s Blue Heaven. The corner was often a starting and ending place for Zulu Social Aid and Pleasure Club funerals. 449 South Rampart is one of three remaining two-story brick Italianate buildings that were part of an original row of five joined terrace houses.
The Iroquois Theater is the second of four structures in the 400 block of South Rampart Street that are strongly connected to early jazz history and particularly to Louis Armstrong. John Edward Hasse, curator of American music at the Smithsonian Institution, has said that “there is no block with more structures significant to the history of jazz” than this one.1 The Iroquois Theater was built in the fall of 1911 and had vaudeville programs until 1920.
The Karnofsky Store was, beginning in 1913, the shop, with residence above, of the Jewish family that provided a second home to the young Louis Armstrong. He worked for the Karnofskies on their coal and junk wagons, tooting “a small tin horn,” and ate meals with the family, either in their earlier home on Girod Street or here, or maybe both. The Karnofskies loaned Armstrong money for his first cornet.
Odd Fellows and Masonic Dance Hall/Eagle Saloon, built in 1850, is a three-story brick and stucco commercial building in the Neoclassical Revival style. Now on a largely vacant block in the Central Business District, it was historically in the South Rampart Street commercial and entertainment corridor, a flourishing area for African-Americans that also drew Jewish, Italian, and Chinese people.
