He promised that after his death he would try to communicate from beyond the grave. Houdini was deeply interested in spiritualism during his life, though mainly as a debunker of frauds. After 1900, as a world-renowned celebrity, he lived in a brownstone and played the great Times Square theaters. Before 1900, as an anonymous immigrant, he lived in a tenement, worked in the Garment District and tried to break into the music halls of the Bowery and Coney Island. Houdini's life straddled the decades separating the 19th-century Victorian city from the Jazz Age metropolis. It was in New York that he grew up, kept house and was buried, and in New York, the country's premier magic city, that he presided over the national magic scene.

And though he was born in Hungary and achieved much of his greatest fame in Europe, Houdini went through life a New Yorker. But Harry Houdini is also a historical figure, an immigrant boy who turned 21 in the 1890's. Houdini has become an icon, a name known around the globe, a figure dangling upside down in a straitjacket or plunged into a Water Torture Cell. But many of the sites associated with his life and work survive around New York City. The bust of Houdini gracing the monument is a replacement, the original having been stolen long ago. Standing in a semicircle in front of the impressive Houdini monument, they re-enact the 'breaking of the wand' ritual performed at his funeral service in 1926. AROUND Halloween, at a lonely Queens cemetery, a somber group of magicians converge on the grave of Harry Houdini to conduct a private ceremony on the anniversary of his death.

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