“Harry Houdini not only fell in love with Coney Island, he fell in love at Coney Island,” the magician and historian Richard Steven Cohn said. Speaking at the Coney Island Museum on Sunday, Mr. Cohn said Houdini met his wife Bess there.

Wearing a seersucker suit and white shoes and occasionally playing the accordion, Mr. Cohn began his talk with a trick, and said legend has it that Coney Island got its name from the Dutch word for rabbits, konijn.

Mr. Cohn has his own connection to that famous amusement area in southwest Brooklyn. His grandmother was a theatrical milliner whose parents had a boarding house in Coney Island.

Mr. Cohn placed Coney Island in the context of Brooklyn’s long association with magic. Houdini’s brother Hardeen lived near Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn. At the start of the 20th century, the first American magic magazine, Mahatma, also was published in Brooklyn.

Mr. Cohn recounted how magicians such as the British-born Henry Roltair constructed illusions for Coney Island amusements, including the Upside Down House and Arabian Nights Up-to-Date.

The Australian-born Jean Hugard and British-born Adelaide Herrmann performed magic at Coney Island. “By the 1920s, magic was a bedrock part of Coney Island,” Mr. Cohn said.

Another popular performer was David Bamberg, who later had a major feature illusion show in South America and elsewhere as Fu Man Chu.

Magicians worked in Coney Island in other capacities: The Chautauqua and Lyceum headliner Al Baker had a photo studio there, and Dai Vernon cut paper silhouettes.

Mr. Cohn said the first use of artificial lighting to record an indoor sporting event took place at the Coney Island Athletic Club in 1899. He discussed magicians who worked in the film industry in Brooklyn, including Albert Smith of Vitagraph Company and D.W. Griffith’s cameraman, Billy Bitzer. Mr. Cohn also told how Fred Thompson and Elmer Dundee, who created Luna Park in Coney Island, also created the Hippodrome Theater in Midtown Manhattan, where Houdini famously made an elephant vanish.

Mr. Cohn showed a slide of Cary Grant (né Archibald Leach), an amateur magician who once worked as a stilt walker on the Coney Island boardwalk advertising Steeplechase Park

Toward the close of his presentation, Mr. Cohn introduced two others who also spoke about Coney Island’s magic history: Stanley Palm, who contributed an introduction to an edition of Houdini’s paper magic, and Bob Yorburg, who showed hand-carved wooden Punch and Judy puppets once used by Al Flosso, the magician whom Milton Berle dubbed “the fakir of Coney Island.”

Flosso, who later ran a famous magic shop in Manhattan, had worked in sideshows at Coney Island. William “Budd” Abbott, who would became famous in the comedy duo of Abbott and Costello, once worked as his shill.

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Another magician who fell in love at Coney Island was Dai Vernon (1894–1992), known as the Professor. “Magic has produced very few artists, but Vernon is one of them unequivocably,” the magician and historian David Ben said. Mr. Ben is the author of the recently published “Dai Vernon: A Biography” (Squash Publishing).

Vernon came to New York in 1915 to attend the Art Students League. He enjoyed magic and to earn money, he worked cutting paper silhouettes in the summer at Coney Island, among other places, and selling them at 50 cents apiece or two for 75 cents. While in Coney Island, he met his wife Jeanne Hayes, who had been recruited by a barker to be the lower half of a sawing-in-half routine.

Vernon went on to have a distinguished career performing in clubs and speakeasies during the Jazz Age. Fooling Houdini with a card trick seven times in Chicago in 1922, Vernon became known as “the man who fooled Houdini.” He sought out card secrets from famous gamblers.

Vernon performed a Harlequin act at Radio City Music Hall in 1938 set artistically to classical music.While working at the Rainbow Room, a dove from his act once flew out the window. Vernon was concerned for its safety, saying that New York was so tough, even the pigeons cooed with an accent. But the dove found its way to Vernon’s residence in Brooklyn, arriving safely.

In 1941, Vernon was living on 34th Street and had a job reading blueprints at a Robert Moses construction site. He was assisting a worker who was struggling to carry a pail of mercury when the plank snapped. Mr. Ben’s book ends with Vernon tumbling six stories into the icy East River, breaking both his arms.