Houdini, shackled hand and foot, took an audacious manacled dive into the ocean from Atlantic City’s Million Dollar Pier in 1908. One of many amusement piers built on the resort town’s shorefront since the Ocean Pier in 1881, this one was erected in 1902, also by Captain John L Young, who lived there in a fabulous mansion.

The Million Dollar Pier, lined with rides, midway games, an aquarium, ballroom and vaudeville theatre and an electric trolley line, was also where Thomas Edison famously fished, early Miss Americas were crowned and the dance known as the Cakewalk was introduced. In more recent times the pier became the Ocean One Mall, then the Steel Pier (see correction below), and in 2007 plans were afloat to redevelop it once again, as the 200 Million Dollar Pier, though another source says the wrecker’s ball will transform it into a Trump-owned condo complex.

Just down the boardwalk from the famous fun piers was the Ambassador Hotel, where Harry and Bess Houdini spent a weekend in June 1922 along with Sir Arthur and Lady Jean Conan Doyle. It was a summer holiday for their kids and a break from touring for both dads, so everyone was up for some fun, as is somewhat evident in the family snapshot below, even if Harry looks like a stick in the mud.

The Ambassador site is now occupied by the Tropicana Casino and Resort, which apparently used some of the old walls at least. On June 17, hoping to help Houdini get over his grief at his mother’s death, Jean Doyle entered a trance and, via automatic writing, “contacted” her.

Harry was polite about the session, but fumed later that the message from Mom was all in English and that Mrs Doyle had begin by inscribing at the top of the page a Christian cross — his mother had been a devout Jew and spoke no English at all, and nor did she mention the fact that it happened to be her birthday. His relationship with the Doyles was tarnished forever.

In July 2008 a Sotheby’s auction in London was expecting to earn up to £3,500 for a collection of material from the Doyles’ meeting with the Houdinis in Atlantic City. There were 11 photos including the ones below, plus Harry’s December 1922 typewritten letter to Sir Arthur about the “séance” Lady Doyle conducted via automatic writing.

Houdini was trying to calm down Doyle after he’d written an article for the New York Sun condemning spiritualism and why, during the séance, Harry had jotted down the name Powell. Doyle had assumed the reference was to his friend Ellis Powell, whose death he’d just heard about, and jumped to the conclusion that Houdini was displaying his pschic powers.

Harry was thinking of his own friend and fellow magician Eugene Powell, who was in dire straits at the time. His scribbling the name down at that moment, he said, was “a coincidence”.

“I was heartily in accord and in sympathy at the séance given by Lady Doyle,” Houdini said, “but the letter as received was written in the English language, and although my sainted mother lived in America 50 years, she could not read, write or speak English.”

Harry explained that he’d said nothing to the Doyles in Atlantic City because he wanted to consider the situation, but in fact he didn’t want to embarrass them.

The Ambassador, built in 1919, was the biggest hotel on the Boardwalk in its day, and also welcomed Enrico Caruso, President Warren Harding and, in 1929, gangsters Meyer Lansky, Lucky Luciano, Dutch Schultz and Al Capone, who needed to discuss some business, like the St Valentine’s Day Massacre a few months earlier.

Capone, accused by his colleagues of giving organised crime a bad name, took the train from Atlantic City to Philadelphia and turned himself in on a minor firearm-possession charge so he’d have some protective walls around him for a while.

A fellow member of the Google Earth Community has pointed out that the Steel Pier was never known as the Ocean One mall. The Ocean One mall was at the pier about 10 blocks south, between Arkansas and Missouri Avenues, and is now known as the Pier at Caesars.

If you have Google Earth, you can download my post on “Houdini’s Greatest Escapes” here.

Below, a portion of the letter Harry sent Conan Doyle explaining his reaction to the Atlantic City séance, auctioned off by Sotheby’s in 2008.