If Houdini did live or work at East Eagle, the house no longer stands. While Houdini wouldn’t achieve fame in the United States for another four years, it’s possible a local competing magician living at East Eagle heard of him, knew he was out of town, and used Houdini’s name to attract more clients.ħ1 East Eagle Street, Buffalo, New York, today (Photo: Google Maps Street View) Perhaps Hyman rented a room in the house. HOUDINI” listed in the ad could have been Jacob Hyman, Houdini’s friend and former Brothers Houdini partner, who, for a time, also used the name Houdini. But that answer would be simple: Space there was limited and distractions aplenty. And in this scenario, we might ask ourselves why he wouldn’t want to teach at the East 69th Street apartment, assuming he still lived there in 1895. As in the case above, he wouldn’t have had much time to teach between gigs. He rented it: He could have rented a room in the house specifically to conduct lessons and other related magic business.While it’s tempting to accept this explanation, it’s unlikely he could afford a home considering his meager income at the time. If that’s true, he wouldn’t have had too much time because four weeks later he began his tour with the American Gaiety Girls, starting in Troy, New York, almost 300 miles from Buffalo. In that case, he could have been trying to generate potential income for when he returned in late September at the end of the Welsh Brothers Circus season. He owned it: He might have owned, and lived in, the house, conducting magic lessons while he wasn’t on the road performing.In my mind, this leaves only a few possible explanations for the ad, whether or not anyone even responded to it: By the time the ad was published in August 1895, Houdini and Bess were in central Pennsylvania touring with the Welsh Brothers Circus. All we have is the following advertisement, which appeared on page 10 of the Thursday, August 15, 1895, edition of the Buffalo Courier, and it seems to be the only ad like it published at the time:Īs of 1890, Houdini lived in an apartment at 305 East 69th Street in New York City (the building is no longer there but probably looked something like the existing brownstone row houses down the street). However, as far as I know, 71 East Eagle Street isn’t in the Houdini history books. There are 13 residential addresses associated with Houdini from 1878 to 1926, not including any homes in Budapest, Hungary (where he lived the first four years of his life), his summer home in Stamford, Connecticut, and a villa in Los Angeles, California, where he might have lived but didn’t own. I write “might” because we don’t know if either of those scenarios is true. Little did he know that 39 years later, Harry Houdini, future world-renowned King of Handcuffs, might be teaching magic, or even living, in that home. Rockwell petitioned the Buffalo Common Council to build a 7 x 14′ addition to his one-story home at 71 East Eagle Street in Buffalo, New York.
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