Hammerstein’s Victoria at 1481 Broadway was a trendy vaudeville theatre where Houdini had a sensational run of engagements in July 1912, public curiosity whetted by a stunt on the 23rd in which the magician escaped from shackles and ropes while dangling from the Heidelberg Building, also on Times Square. Police stopped Houdini from replicating the stunt at the Victoria, built in 1899, which had a popular roof garden.

Harry had three consecutive and very successful seasons in the roof garden, each time repeating his underwater escape both in the East River — pictured here, with his assistants awaiting the signal that he’s freed himself inside before releasing the crate — and the harbour.

All of this was built atop a 1908 appearance at Hammerstein’s in which Houdini performed his soon-to-be-famous Weed Tire Grip Chain Escape. On April 10 he overcame six padlocked Weed chains one night, then on May 22, challenged to outdo himself, he pulled free of handcuffs and leg irons and eight padlocked Weed chains while wrapped inside steel-rimmed automobile wheels.

The theatre was demolished in 1916, and the 11-storey Heidelberg, conceived as little more than a giant “advertising tower”, was levelled in 1984.

St Louis’ original American Theatre stood at 619 Market Street until 1953 and early in the century was the city’s top spot for touring vaudeville acts, so it’s likely that that’s where Houdini first introduced his famous Milk Can Escape on January 27, 1908.

This innovation on an old trick saw him somehow emerge from a sealed, water-filled milk can when all of its rivets, locks and chains remained undisturbed. The secret was that the can came apart below the seals. Hidden behind a curtain, Harry had only to lift off the lid, undo his handcuffs, and wait a while until members of the audience, challenged to hold their breath as long as he apparently was, were in an uproar. An assistant, looking suitably alarmed, invariably raised an axe ready to break the can apart moments before Houdini reappeared.

Houdini had earned a devoted following in St Louis nine years earlier when the chief of police added his name to written testimony, published in the press, that “the famous Handcuff King” and, comically enough, “positively the only conjurer in the world who strips stark naked”, had in his own office been searched, gagged and shackled hand and foot with eight sets of irons, and yet successfully released himself “with absolutely no chance of confederacy”.