In 1907 Houdini became one of the many vaudeville stars who made BF Keith’s Theatre at 547 Washington Street in Boston one of country’s the most successful venues for live entertainment. During his five-week run he treated the audience to a whole slew of novel escapes: from a coffin, a paper box and a glass box, a ladder, wound up in fishing line, from an iron boiler, a giant football and a rolltop desk, each one presented as a challenge by members of the community. The photo below was taken in Boston’s Tombs prison in 1906.

Keith and EF Albee opened their theatre in 1894, and in between vaudeville acts, that was where Thomas Edison demonstrated his new Vitascope movie projector in 1896, the first time Bostonians watched a film.

Down the pike, Holyoke, Massachusetts, has the distinction of having witnessed Houdini’s first jail escape, in 1895. (More on this below.) He was touring with a troupe called the American Gaiety Girls at the time and playing the Empire Theater. The escape got only local publicity — it wasn’t until he repeated it in a big city, in Chicago three years later, that the buzz went round the nation.

The aforementioned Glass Box Escape was quite a strategic shift for Houdini: you could make sure he was really in there and that he hadn’t taken any tools with him — so how was he going to pull this off? Well, what good is a window when the curtain is drawn?

On either January 20 or February 14, 1907 (depending on the source), the Boston fans were the first to glimpse the case made by the Pittsburgh Plate Glass Company for a challenge concocted by the Boston Athletic Association. All six three-eight-inch-thick panes of glass were secured with nuts and smooth-headed bolts facing the inside. The panes were also bolted together with strips of steel padlocked on the outside with dual-tumbler locks. Once shielded by the curtain, Harry produced a tool (you didn’t search him closely enough) and unscrewed the lid.

In October 2008 Sidney Radner — America’s best-known collector of Houdini paraphernalia — announced plans for a new Houdini museum to be established in Holyoke, Massachusetts, his hometown and the place, he says, where in 1895 Harry first challenged the police to try and keep him locked up.

It wasn’t immediately clear what impact a museum in Holyoke would have on the long-established one in Houdini’s hometown, Appleton, Wisconsin, where much of the gear on view belongs to Radner.

Radner became a protege of Harry’s brother Hardeen after meeting him at a magic convention in Springfield, Massachusetts, when Sidney was still a teenager.

He and his friend, Mount Holyoke College student Elizabeth Dobrska — who’ll serve as director — unveiled plans for the non-profit Sid Radner Museum of Houdini and Holyoke to be opened at 147 North High Street with the help of the Springfield-based Gasoline Alley Foundation and private benefactors then being solicited.

They were seeking $200,000 for the project, including the building’s renovation. It’s website is here.

Radner owned one of the world’s largest collections of Houdini memorabilia but sold much of it in 2004. He still had a lot, he said when the Holyoke project was announced, including many pieces in storage and on display in Las Vegas.