TRAPDOORS & SECRET PASSAGES IN HOUDINI'S HOUSE

Trapdoor to cellar through lower entrance, to left.

We're still hard at work on our series of new revelations about Houdini in Russia. But we're holding it for next week - something big has intervened. As we reported recently, Houdini's house has come up for sale and today we managed to get into the cellar.

On his blog Wild About Harry, our friend John Cox did a fine piece on the four-story West Harlem brownstone at 278 West 113 Street that has just come on the market for the first time in 26 years. 

If previous owners had not put up this modern and ugly front-door buzzer, Houdini's house would have permanent landmark status. In New York this means it can never be changed in its essential design. Luckily, previous owners, even those who did not know the house was Houdini's, loved "old stuff" and much original detail remains intact.

The house has been open for showing for two weeks now - all except for its most mysterious and even legendary space: the cellar. The cellar, with its outside entrance, was the place Houdini claimed he used to sneak his secrets in and out, hiding them from Bess or from an audience in the library.

Houdini's hands touched these railings.

We badgered the real estate agent to the breaking point and she finally let us go down the two flights of stairs leading to the cellar. And there we found a trove of genuine Houdini artifacts.

This, for example, was Houdini's wine press! We don't know if he or Bess used it for wine, cider or fruit juice, or all of the above, but it was just the thing in basements during Prohibition! 

Exterior entry to trapdoor, at garden level.

Trapdoor in ceiling of cellar.

Now we come to trapdoors and secret passages. This iron trapdoor in the ceiling of the cellar is two or three times bigger than your normal 1890 coal chute - wide enough to admit a man, even a man and a woman, from the outdoors.

This iron ladder, also original with the house, was the crucial link from the trapdoor in the cellar's ceiling to the underground floor six feet below. 

(As for the wheel? To quote John Lennon: "Even the royal House of Hannover had the Wheel." Could it be that one from the movie?)

Steps away from the trapdoor was the enormous dumbwaiter - again, much larger than the traditional version, big enough to hold two people. It runs vertically through the entire house from top to bottom, from cellar to fourth floor, with a hidden doorway at every floor.

The dumbwaiter, all bricked up, unfortunately.

We believe that this may be the mechanism sought by Bob Loomis in his recent book Houdini's Final Incredible Secret, in which an assistant must enter and leave Houdini's library without being detected. This was the key to Houdini's masterful illusion that left Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes, speechless.

So? Anyone want to go $4.6-million? Let's buy it, Houdiniphiles, and then we can, at our leisure, solve the mysteries of 278.