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. 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.

On May 7, 1907, in Rochester, New York — a city on whose beaches I used to frolic as a child — Houdini performed one of his early manacled bridge jumps. He dived not into Lake Ontario, where I paddled, though, or even the Genesee River, but the Erie Canal, from a span at the canal’s weighlock, and while it was certainly special for the crowd of thousands gathered, it was doubly special for him because, as he recorded proudly in his diary, “Ma saw me jump!”

His beloved mother (and what must she have thought, seeing her boy re-enter the womb, as it were?) was among the throng witnessing a bold new ploy in self-promotion, a free stunt that Houdini would perform again and again in every city he was booked to generate publicity for his stage shows.

Here he slid out of his arm and leg shackles and emerged from the water within 15 seconds, but he later always took a lot longer to reappear in order to build suspense. The Rochester bridge jump was even filmed, with the footage now in the archives of the city’s George Eastman House (and, like everything else, on YouTube).

The weighlock, pictured here, where canal barges were weighed to assess tariffs, was just south of Court Street on the east side of the Genesee River. The Broad Street Bridge was originally the canal’s aqueduct across the river. The Erie Canal in this vicinity later became the bed of a subway, but that too was ultimately abandoned in favour of rail and vehicular traffic.

In 1991, in the banquet room at Rochester’s downtown Holiday Inn, one of the annual Official Houdini Seances was held, a few hundred metres from the site of his bridge jump. (The photo here is actually from the 1986 seance.)

Psychic Bernice Golden led Houdini’s niece Marie Blood, Henry Muller, curator of the Houdini Magical Hall of Fame in Niagara Falls, and Ruth Braden, who was then in the process of writing “The Life and Many Deaths of Harry Houdini”, along with the son of the magician’s longtime assistant and nine other participants, in an effort to summon his spirit at the exact time of his death 65 years earlier.

They joined hands around a table laden with handcuffs and lock picks, a bronze bust of Houdini, his wand and the letter from Arthur Conan Doyle, owned by Muller, in which the illusionist had selected 10 words to formulate a code that would signify his existence in the afterlife.

Television cameras and 80 spectators looked on for half an hour as … nothing happened. Nevertheless, Muller said, “I think he’d love it. Houdini was the greatest showman of all time.”

The seances still take place each year in locations of some prominence in Houdini’s life. In 1978 it was held at the American Museum of Magic in Marshall, Michigan, with his favourite snack, bagels and lox, on the table as a lure. He wasn’t hungry.

In an interesting article featured on her website, writer Tricia Vita describes a visit to Appleton and the then-upcoming seance on October 31, 2001, at the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, Michigan. Among the “regulars” planning to attend were Thomas Boldt, executive president of Appleton’s Houdini Historical Center, and Sidney Radner, director of the Official Houdini Seance, one-time protege of Hardeen and owner of most of the memorabilia at the Appleton museum and the Venetian Resort Hotel in Las Vegas.

Vita says she was a guest at the 1997 seance at Connecticut’s Goodspeed Opera House, at which Radner placed upon the table his copy of the seven-cylinder Bramah lock that Harry had struggled with in London in 1904’s famous Mirror challenge. (David Copperfield has the only other pair.)

Radner had previously included the cuffs at seances in New York, Los Angeles, London and Appleton. “Houdini gave these handcuffs to his brother,” Vita reports him as intoning in Connecticut, “and said that he would unlock them if he come back in a physical way.”