Founded in 2004, the Long Island Music & Entertainment Hall of Fame (LIMEHOF) has for two years occupied the former site of the Dogwood Hollow Amphitheatre, where Louis Armstrong performed in 1958. A New Orleanian by birth but longtime resident of Corona, Armstrong was inducted in 2008 alongside the Ramones, Simon & Garfunkel, Walter Becker, Aaron Copland, Neil Diamond, Arlo Guthrie, Barbra Streisand, Carole King, and other artists with less tenuous connections to Long Island (Mariah Carey, LL Cool J, Public Enemy) than these outer-borough natives.
On the morning I arrived, traffic slowed on the outskirts of Stony Brook as rubberneckers stopped to survey the damage from a storm that had reduced Mills Pond to a heap of slathered mud, bursting a dam and flooding surrounding properties. Safe from the wreckage were guitars played by Steve Vai and Sam “Bluzman” Taylor, DMC’s sneakers and Perry Como’s loafers, a glittery Debbie Gibson cocktail number, and an unnervingly humanlike bone from the cover of Twisted Sister’s 1984 LP, Stay Hungry—all in the custody of LIMEHOF, t…