Magic Shop Moves Alongside Houdini Haunt

There's no escape from fate. Tannen's Magic shop, now New York's oldest operating magic store, has relocated down the hallway from what was the site of Houdini's old magic shop in Herald Square.

Call it a peregrination of prestidigitators. This locus of hocus pocus - "Suite 608" at 45 West 34th St. - is spitting distance from the final premises of the Flosso-Hornman-Martinka store, which served magicians since just after the Civil War and of which Houdini was president in 1919.

Although Martinka & Co. continues in its present incarnation in cyberspace, the mantle of New York's oldest physical shop is now affixed to Tannen's Magic, begun in 1925.Tannen's,the business that was once the new kid on the block among magic dealers, today finds itself the last remnant among New York's top-tier magic emporia. For decades, Tannen's and Flosso-Hornman-Martinka shops coexisted with the mildest of rivalries.Al Flosso affectionately called Lou Tannen "kid," recalled writer Robert Reiss, who at one time worked for both stores.

Louis Tannen, a kinetic redhead, founded The Nat Louis Fun Shop in Brooklyn in the 1920s next to the Fabian Fox Theater at Nevins Street and Flatbush Avenue. By the middle of the next decade, he moved the store to 52nd Street near Stillman's Gym.

In 1941, Tannen moved again to the Wurlitzer Building. There, in the first of his shops located above street level, foot traffic vanished but cognoscenti ascended to view the latest innovations in the practice of magic.

When the Wurlitzer Building was torn down, Tannen's brother and partner, Irv Tannen, quipped, "We're not that great magicians, to keep ourselves suspended in midair."

Louis Tannen became a manufacturer, first of inexpensive pocket tricks, then of the priciest stage-scale illusions. Perhaps most important to his growing publishing reputation in the literature of legerdemain was issuing a multivolume series called the Tarbell Course in Magic. It's still in print.

During World War II, Tannen performed for the United Service Organization and for the Red Cross, where he established a personal performing style noted for vivacity. His flamboyant style was honed through hundreds of wartime performances.

The taxonomy of tricks in Tannen's inventory includes multiplying rabbits sculpted from sponge rubber; apparatus for the levitation of supine assistants; cards, thimbles, vases, cylinders, boxes within boxes, canes - all aimed at the cultivation of digital dexterity.

Martinka & Co, whose last lair lay in "Suite 607" next to the present location of Tannen's, also has a storied legacy. Francis Martinka and his brother began a magic store in Essen, Germany, in the 1860s. Moving to America, they opened a shop called The Magical Palace in 1885.

Succeeding owners of the Martinka store included Carter the Great, who, to the surprise of customers, kept in the the shop a live lion that was used in an illusion called" The Lion's Bride"; Harry Houdini; Frank Ducrot, who was adept at chapeaugraphy, the art of making hats from a single piece of felt; Al Flosso, known as "The Coney Island Fakir," so-named by Milton Berle; and Jack Flosso, who moved the store interior intact in the 1980s from 304 West 34 St. to 45 West 34 St.

Among the many who visited Flosso Hornmann Magic at "Suite 607" were comedians George Burns and Henny Youngman; ventriloquist Senor Wences, whose thumb served as a mandible; Canadian-born and tyedye-clad magician Doug Henning; David Rockefeller; inventor/magician Jeff Sheridan; and Sara Lee, whose father named a line of cheesecakes after her when she was 8 years old.

The list of those visiting "Suite 608" - Tannen's new location since its move on August 2 - have included author, inventor, magician, and magic collector Doug Edwards and magician and Israeli television personality Erez Moshe, who gave a lecture inaugurating the space. Attending the lecture were magician Michael Bosniak, known on Long Island as "The Wonderful Wizard Boz" and actor Nick Addeo, who is known as "Nicholas the Mentalist" and is a habitue of Maui Taco, a gathering place for local magicians.

"We are keeping the tradition of magic alive in Manhattan," Steven Brown, who became president of Tannen's Magic in 2002, told the Knickerbocker. "For without a magic shop, there's no focal point for the gathering of magicians." He is a 1986 graduate of Parsons School of Design. In years prior, Mr. Brown coached professional ice hockey in Sweden and Finland.

Asked about the move, Mr. Brown said, "It was destined. As I looked for space, I did not know Flosso [the last owner of Martinka & Co] had been here...as I'd been a Tannen's customer." Customers who come looking for the ghost of Martinka & Co. will now find a new world at Tannen's down the hall.