People are walking around dressed up like cartoon characters or giant human robots. There’s a statue of the Statue of Liberty in the middle of the sidewalk. Oh, no, it isn’t a statue, Houdini realizes. It’s a lady dressed like the Statue of Liberty who is standing so still that she looks like a statue. Her face, arms, and legs are painted green. A man is playing a guitar and wearing nothing but underpants with NAKED COWBOY written on them.
Houdini just stares. He’s as out of touch in my century as I am in his.
So much has changed since he was last in New York back in 1926. But the streets are the same, and he knows his way around. He knows where he should go. He walks east one block on Forty-Third Street. Strange-looking cars and double-decker buses clog the streets. Weird smells waft over from pushcarts with foods he’s never tasted.
When he gets to the corner at Sixth Avenue, he realizes that the elevated train tracks he remembered aren’t there anymore. He looks across the street for the Hippodrome, a theater where he performed so many times.
No Hippodrome! The giant building, which once took up the whole block, is gone.
“Excuse me, ma’am,” Houdini says politely to a lady passing by. “Where is the Hippodrome?”
She brushes past him without making eye contact.
Houdini assumes the lady is hard of hearing. He stops a man and asks him the same question, but the man is attending to the cell phone in his hand and barely notices anyone else. The next passerby barely slows down when Houdini approaches him.
“Sorry kid, I don’t have any spare change,” the guy mutters.
“I don’t want change,” Houdini replies, “I just want—”
But the guy walks past without turning around.
“Excuse me, ma’am,” he says to the next lady, just a little more assertively. “Where is the Hippodrome?”
“The what?” she replies.
“The Hippodrome,” he repeats. “It was one of the largest theaters in the country. It used to be right across the street. Did it move?”
“How should I know?” the woman says brusquely before moving on. “Ask your mother. Or ask a cop.”
Not a bad idea. Houdini walks down the street until he finds a policeman in the middle of the block.
“Excuse me, officer,” he says, bowing slightly to show respect. “Can you direct me toward the Hippodrome? I assume the location has changed since my last visit to the city.”
The policeman looks Houdini up and down carefully. All the likely possibilities go through his mind. Runaway? Lost? On drugs? Mentally challenged? Psychotic? Oddball? The boy did look a little out of place. But he didn’t look threatening. Of course, that didn’t mean he wasn’t threatening. A lot of lunatics look perfectly normal, until they do something violent and crazy.
This personality evaluation takes about a second and a half. Finally, the policeman decides the boy in front of him is just an innocent kook.
“I heard of the Hippodrome,” the cop says. “But it hasn’t been here in a long time.”
In fact, the Hippodrome closed in 1939. Houdini was right. It had been one of the largest theaters in the world. The stage alone was so big, it could hold a thousand performers at a time. In its heyday, the Hippodrome was home to just about every form of popular entertainment: vaudeville, silent movies, talkies, plays, opera, boxing, wrestling, and the circus. In 1918, Houdini himself made a ten-thousand-pound elephant vanish before the audience’s eyes, right on the Hippodrome stage.
Sadly, the Great Depression drove the magnificent theater out of business, and it was demolished. More than ten years went by before it was replaced by a much less glamorous twenty-one-story office building.
Houdini is sad that the site of his past glory is gone. He doesn’t even notice the name of the office building that took its place.
Or the plaque right next to the reception desk inside.
Harry Houdini is not the kind of person to wallow in self-pity. He’s an optimist, and he has a constant desire for adulation. If the people of the twentieth century loved him, he figures, so will the people of the 21st century. He’ll just have to start all over again from scratch. No fancy props. No fame. He’ll have to prove himself again. He will persist, and he will persevere. And he welcomes the challenge.
The Hippodrome isn’t the only game in town. It is in the middle of the theater district. There are sure to be plenty of places for him to perform.
Houdini walks back down Forty-Third Street to the first theater he comes to—Henry Miller’s Theatre. He’s relieved to see it’s still there, even though the big sign in front has a name he has never heard of: Stephen Sondheim. Houdini strides boldly into the box office.
“Excuse me,” he says to the woman behind the window. “Who would I speak to about booking acts?”
“Acts?” she asked.
“I do a little magic,” Houdini said modestly, “and escapes, mostly. Card tricks. Pretty much anything. Much like the great Harry Houdini used to. Have you ever heard of him?”
“Sure I heard of him,” the lady replied. “But we don’t put on acts here. We put on plays and musicals.”
Houdini smiles, pleased that his name is still remembered after so many years.
“Is there a theater where people might go to see a magician these days?” he asks.
“Uh…Madison Square Garden?” she says after thinking it over.
“Yes, of course,” Houdini says, brightening. “I’ve been to the Garden many times. It’s still around?”
“Sure it’s still around,” the lady replies. “Where’s it gonna go?”
“Then I am off to Madison Square Park,” says Houdini, tipping an imaginary hat. “On Madison Avenue, of course.”
The lady snorts, as if only a total idiot would think Madison Square Garden was near Madison Square Park or Madison Avenue.
“Madison Square Garden is at Thirty-First Street,”
