When the New Bedford Hotel Hosted Louis ‘Satchmo’ Armstrong

The New Bedford Hotel had come and gone by the time I came of age. I have no first-hand memory of the hotel as a hotel, but from what I heard, it was a grand and majestic hotel.

The New Bedford Hotel opened at 725 Pleasant Street in 1921. My parent's generation recalls the luxury and splendor of the hotel in its heyday. The generation before mine spoke of the lavish ballroom that occupied the top floor of the New Bedford Hotel.

New Bedford's first radio station, WNBH, broadcast from there; thus the call letters "NBH" for "New Bedford Hotel."

Get our free mobile app

The New Bedford Hotel lasted only 48 years before closing in 1969. It reopened in 1972 as senior housing.

Former Standard-Times writers Bridget McSweeny and Susan Pawlak-Seaman, in an article dated May 5, 1997, told how the New Bedford Hotel was "the place to be" in its day.

Former New Bedford Housing Authority Official Bruce W. Duarte told the pair that four presidents and actor Gregory Peck were guests of the New Bedford Hotel, with Peck spending several nights at the hotel in June of 1956.

More exciting to me, however, was to learn that legendary jazz trumpeter, vocalist and star of stage and screen Louis "Satchmo" Armstrong also spent a night at the New Bedford Hotel.

Former Standard-Times writer Jack Spillane, who appears regularly on WBSM, reported in 2010, "Caught between gigs in Newport, Gloucester and Boston, Satchmo and his band chose to stay at the New Bedford Hotel."

Spillane's piece suggests Armstrong's overnighter would have occurred around 1950.

According to Spillane, when asked that night by a reporter to name his favorite town, Armstrong replied, "All of them," adding, "The audience is the same whether it is Carnegie Hall or someone's backyard."