Houdini’s headstone (photograph by the author) The collection continues to expand, with recent acquisitions including Houdini’s Escape Coffin from 1907, which he managed to free himself from in 66 minutes after it was banged shut with six inch nails. The museum opened in 2012 and is formed from Dreyer’s private collection of Houdini memorabilia, with hundreds of items from vintage posters to straightjackets to handcuffs, and even the trunk in which he performed his “Metamorphosis” trick. One place that is happy to welcome fans is the small Houdini Museum inside Roger Dreyer’s Fantasma magic shop across from Penn Station on Seventh Avenue. Houdini Museum (via Houdini Museum & Fantasma Magic) However, you can appreciate the home from the street and imagine the escape artist within developing some new impossible escape. While with the little balcony and unchanged façade you can still almost imagine Houdini stepping out from its doorway (on which a historic red plaque rests in honor of his residency), it is still a private home and its current owner reportedly isn’t fond of the flood of visiting fans who arrive on Halloween, the anniversary of Houdini’s death.
An oversized bathtub was installed so that he could perfect his underwater escape tricks, and he kept a vast library of books on magic.
The neighborhood at the time was mostly Jewish and German, and Houdini settled in by making his house into a place of respite and practice. When Houdini hit it big in 1904, he bought a stately brownstone up in Harlem on 113th Street, where he would live until his 1926 death. Houdini’s home in Harlem (in the center with the small balcony) (via Google Maps) Here are four places in New York City where you can still find the great magician manifested: Yet more than a stage, New York was Houdini’s home. In the East River he survived his first crate escape, tossed in the currents between Manhattan and Brooklyn, and in 1926 he escaped from a coffin at the bottom of a pool in the Shelton Hotel on Lexington (now a Marriott Hotel). In 1918, he even made an elephant vanish at the New York Hippodrome. It was while performing in Coney Island that he met his future wife Bess, in Flatbush where he recorded his voice on wax cylinders with Thomas Edison, and in 1917 he performed his straightjacket escape above a Times Square crowd while hanging upside down from a crane being employed to work on the subway. By the time he died in 1926, however, he was the city’s most thrilling performer, and the shadow of the great escape artist still remains. Harry Houdini arrived in New York City in 1886, an anonymous Budapest-born newcomer in the frenetic cityscape. Houdini in his crate escape trick, first performed in New York’s East River (via New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, Billy Rose Theatre Collection)
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