An Insider's Tour of

New York's
Disappearing Magic
History
Peek behind the curtain of once-magnificent
venues and the back rooms where magicians
share their secrets.
By Sarah Laskow JUNE 26, 2018

Fifteen of us are gathered in front of the counter, as Noah

Levine pulls the green plastic wand from a bottle of bubble
solution. He has urged us all to move in close. Slim and
bearded, in a gray blazer that leaves his wrists exposed, Levine
is friendly but formal, as if he’s only there to pour a bottle of
champagne he’d just opened. He blows gently, raising a flight of
bubbles from the wand, and they shimmer and float, rainbow-
edged orbs suspended in the still air.

“There’s nothing like your first encounter with magic,” Levine

says. He watches the bubbles drift before his eyes and lets them
linger until the moment that it seems like there’s nothing more
to see. Then he reaches out, and with his long fingers he plucks
one from the air. In that instant it becomes an iridescent ball of
glass, tangible, inarguable. Holding it still, he lets that sink in
for a moment, then drops the ball on the glass counter.

It’s the first trick he’s performed for us, and he turns to the
audience with an air of conspiracy: That was amazing, right?

We’re in Tannen’s Magic shop in Midtown Manhattan, after it

has closed for the night and the whole building feels empty. Two
or three nights a week, Levine hosts a show here in the
afterhours, drawing in guests with the promise that, in this
quiet, softly lit room, they can get a glimpse inside the closed
world of magicians.
Before the show had started, Levine laid out a series of magic
books. One was filled with small photos of Tony Slydini,
demonstrating card tricks. As I paged through, Levine explained
how Slydini, an Italian magician who came to New York in
1930, was a master of close-up magic, obsessed with the
psychology that gives the best tricks their impact. He excelled at
misdirection.

For the uninitiated, the books were less fascinating, perhaps,

than Tannen’s wall of playing cards, their backs displaying more
than one hundred bright designs. Or the aging set of specimen
drawers filled with silk handkerchiefs, flash paper, sponge
donuts, and other small, magical objects. Or the giant elephant,
salvaged from a stage set, that dominates one corner of the
store. Part of the way through the show, Levine piled the books
into a stack and revealed that they contained the secrets for
every trick he had and would perform. If we had wanted to, we
could have discovered those secrets ourselves. But we had
missed our chance. He set the books aside, in the same corner
as the mysterious black door that led to Tannen’s back room,
where only select magicians are allowed.

New York itself is an engine of misdirection.

Even today, when it’s possible to learn the secrets behind many
tricks online, a budding magician needs to make his or her way
to a place like Tannen’s to find a community and be initiated
into the depths of this art. Spend enough time in magic shops,
Levine says, and “you start to realize there are deeper secrets
here.” For more than a century, their back rooms have been
clubhouses for the most talented prestidigitators, illusionists,
and conjurers, legendary sites of innovation and bravado, where
insiders such as the great Dai Vernon tried out methods to
baffle even the most experienced magicians, and show off
subtleties of technique and showmanship that can be
appreciated only in intimate settings.

New York was once the center of gravity for some of the world’s
greatest magicians, both professional and amateur, some known
to the world, some famous only among their own kind. The
magnificent venues where they performed and the back rooms
where they chewed over the art of wonderment have pulled a
very real disappearing act of their own. These places helped
shape magic, as spaces for inspiration and communities of
purists, wonks, obsessives, perfectionists, and charlatans.
Levine had promised to reveal a glimpse of places an outsider
might never notice, and I was hoping that, by traveling the city
in search of a few of these spots, I would get a peek behind the
curtain, into the magical past.

I learned my first trick on the Bowery, as we walked past stores

stacked with salt shakers, giant pots, and industrial-sized
mixers on a spring morning. “If you need a crazy prop,” Levine
said, “these restaurant supply stores are the greatest.”

Levine once spent an afternoon in these shops looking for the

perfect cocktail shakers to use in the cups-and-balls trick, in
which balls appear where they shouldn’t and vanish just as
mysteriously. This trick dates back thousands of years, and its
methods are no longer secret. The magician starts with more
balls than he shows the audience; one’s already hiding in or
underneath a cup, and during the trick, while the audience’s
attention is elsewhere, he swiftly secretes the others to spots
where they’ll later be revealed. Penn and Teller perform a
version with clear plastic cups and explain exactly what they’re
doing. Levine had been hired to teach a famous actress to
perform the trick for a movie, which was why he needed the
shakers.
Even if you know how cups and balls works, in the hands of a
skillful performer, you won’t see the movement of the balls, no
matter how carefully you look. When Penn and Teller do it in
full view it still feels like magic. The same principle applies to
New York itself. However many times you walk down a street,
paying close attention, some detail escapes your notice, or only
exists for those in the know. The grave of Harry Houdini,
perhaps the most famous magician in history, is part of a family
plot in Queens, and though it might seem like an obvious
attraction it spent years in disrepair. I’ve walked past the year-
round Halloween costume store on Broadway countless times
and never knew of the magic shop in the basement, stocked with
throwbacks to the 1980s. Without an invitation, there’s no way
to discover the illegal poker room hidden somewhere in Soho,
where Levine was once asked to perform. New York itself is an
engine of misdirection.
We finally arrived at our first stop, a dark gray building on the
Bowery that looks like a converted garage. It seemed
unremarkable. But Levine laughed when he saw the poster on
the door. “This is a good start!” According to the sign, we were
“standing on the former site of Tony Pastor’s Opera House, one
of the legendary birthplaces of vaudeville.”

In the 19th century, a gig at Tony Pastor’s could jumpstart a

magician’s career. Levine first learned about it in a biography of
Houdini, who thought Pastor’s could be his big break. (Pastor’s
measured review of Houdini: “Satisfactory and interesting.”)
Opened in 1865, the Opera House put on variety shows meant
to appeal to families, not just the men who patronized rowdy
beer halls and saloons in the area. This was a revolutionary
business model, and it transformed the possibilities for
magicians who up until then had stuck to pocket tricks and
close-up magic—the egg bag, the linking rings, simple card
tricks, silk handkerchiefs that change color at a snap—that
worked in smaller, less formal spaces. But given a stage and a
captive audience, tricks could give way to large-scale illusions.
At Pastor’s and theaters like it, objects, animals, and people
changed color, swapped places and body parts, floated in the
air, and vanished from sight.

"When an audience can walk away from you at any moment, you learn to hold their attention transfixed.”
“Coming from a tradition where magicians were making jokes
and doing sleight-of-hand stuff, making people appear and
disappear was a pretty amazing thing. Once you’ve got a nice
vaudeville theater, you’ve got options. You can produce a bird
and then have someone bring it offstage, so there isn’t a bird
flapping all over the place,” Levine said. “It’s not necessarily
about method. You’ve got a wing, you can put stuff there. You
know what the setting will be like. The more control you have,
the more consistent the venue, the better your magic is going to
be. In a short period of time, you can really dumbfound people.”

Levine weaves his way casually around the specifics of magic,

illuminating without revealing too much. He started to describe
a trick called aerial fishing, in which a magician dangles a
fishing pole in the air. All of a sudden a goldfish appears at the
end. In 1902, Mahatma, a magician’s magazine printed by the
magic shop Martinka & Company, noted that the already
legendary trick—"the most ingenious trick ever conceived"—was
seen for the last time at Tony Pastor’s very popular theater. At
one time, performing here was a gig to brag about.

But outside of magician’s magazines, Pastor’s doesn’t mean

much anymore. Its original location is occupied by a generic
upscale restaurant and a condo building. We walked uptown,
tracing Pastor’s moves to a venue on Broadway in 1875, then to
14th Street, a burgeoning theater district in the 1880s. At the
site of that last theater, now home to a furniture store, only a
small plaque hints at the past. Even with our eyes attuned to the
history of magic, we almost missed it amid the distraction.

Vaudeville ushered in a golden age for magicians. They came

from around the world to be part of this business, and some
found fame touring big cities and regional circuits. Wealthy
professionals started learning the art, as a pastime. New magic
shops manufactured tricks and magical apparatuses, and
welcomed traveling magicians, who could use their back rooms
to make repairs or store stage props. On Saturday nights,
Martinka’s, the “Palace of Magic” on the edge of Greenwich
Village, began to host a small group of professionals and
dedicated amateurs to share stories and swap craft. In 1902,
they formalized their club into the Society of American
Magicians, which counted 24 members at its founding and grew
quickly. Long after vaudeville went out of style and its stages
were shuttered, this backroom legacy remained.

More than most histories, magic’s is slippery and impermanent.

Magicians don’t always write their ideas down. New
York’s Conjuring Arts Research Center in Midtown, where
Levine used to work, collects rare texts from magic’s past, but
many of the stories of people such as Vernon, Al Flosso, and
Samuel Hooker—magician’s magicians and stalwarts of the
insider community—are passed down as lore.

With his sharp mustache and debonair smile, Dai Vernon

always looked like he knew more than he was revealing, and as
his stature in the magic community grew, his life became
legend. When he came to New York from Ottawa, Canada, in
1915, the vaudeville circuit was still feeding magicians steady
income and fame, though Pastor’s heyday was long over. A kid
obsessed with magic and card tricks, Vernon gravitated to the
city’s magic shops. Martinka’s had already become legendary,
though from the outside, one reporter wrote in 1916, it looked
like “a little dingy shop … with one window full of dusty
paraphernalia,” in the shadow of Sixth Avenue’s elevated train.
Whatever wonders the shop had to offer were in the back room,
off-limits to newcomers like Vernon.

But the city had other magic shops and other back rooms. When
Vernon visited Clyde Powers’s shop on 42nd Street, he made an
impression by spotting the technique Powers used in a
complicated card trick—it had to do with the number of cards in
each small pile cut from a deck. Powers asked what Vernon
could do and, after seeing him work, invited him into the back
room, the hangout of some of the era’s most famous magicians,
Already, the young Vernon had mastered moves the other
magicians couldn’t manage.
Vernon was supposed to be attending art school, not spending
every afternoon in a magic shop. By summer 1916, he needed a
job, and he was drawn to Coney Island, where magic and
manipulation were core charms. In the amusement parks that
had gone up on the city’s sandy edge, magicians created arcane
illusions. An audience could see a woman’s head grafted onto a
sword or the body of a spider. Dreamland, one of the strip’s
most extravagant parks, once had a 30-foot statue of a topless
angel at its entrance, advertising a Bible-themed spectacle by
the illusionist Roltair.

In 1916, the trains out to Brooklyn’s southern edge had only

recently been converted from steam engines to electrified
subways, transforming Coney into an escape for masses of
Manhattanites. On this sunny Friday in 2018, after visiting the
site of Pastor’s theater, getting on the subway at Union Square
and taking the long ride to the end of the line still felt like
slipping out of the city’s chains. When we arrived at Coney
Island around lunchtime, a breeze was blowing, and the tables
outside Nathan’s Famous hot dog stand were already crowded.
We ambled down the boardwalk, past a man trying to entice
recalcitrant bird to sing along to his half-hearted covers. A
hundred years earlier, this was “America’s Playground." “This
was a fancy place!” said Levine. “I always kind of think of it as a
big carnival, but look at old pictures. You’d get dressed up to go
here.”

We stopped in front of a dirt lot occupied by construction

equipment, next door to an aquarium exhibit featuring
animated characters from the movie Ice Age. It’s where, in
1904, you would have seen Dreamland’s palatial central tower
soar, an illusion all on its own, as gaudy and spectacular as a
Las Vegas casino today, illuminated with thousands of electric
bulbs.
Dreamland burned down in 1911, and by the time Vernon
arrived, a large tent, the Dreamland Circus Sideshow, had gone
up its place. There and at nearby Luna Park, magicians
performed show after show, day after day out. Vernon didn’t get
a job as a magician, though.

Magicians at Coney had to battle countless other diversions for

the attention of the crowds. You can hear Coney Island
showmanship in the voice of the Al Flosso, who began working
there in 1915. When Flosso started his act, there was no pause in
his rat-a-tat pitter-patter, no time for the kids he called “sonny”
to lose focus or look away. “When an audience can walk away
from you at any moment, you learn to hold their attention
transfixed,” Levine said. But Vernon never made magic a full-
time hustle. He was already becoming a purist. Rather than
slather his subtle powers in ham, he started cutting silhouettes
from black paper for passersby. Coney Island was a place to
make a buck and meet other magicians.

Earlier, Levine had described what it meant for a magic trick to

hit. On some level, people understand that they are watching
demonstrations of planning and skill. But it’s also possible to set
tricks up in a way that elicits uncontrollable emotional and
mental reactions—eyes widening, head tilted in amazement, a
gasp of “shut up.” Even the greatest skeptic or insider can be
bowled over in ways they can never expect. “It’s almost,” Levine
said, “like you’re rewiring someone’s mind.”

When he talks, Levine holds his hands with an unconscious

care. Magicians sometimes refer to hands impersonally—“the
hands” make a gesture, cards are held at “the fingertips.” They
are tools, like a surgeon’s. People watch magicians’ hands
closely, and even if they don’t see anything that reveals how a
trick was done, they use “sleight of hand” as an explanation,
without understanding what that actually means. For
magicians, it is a vocabulary of movements—shifts, controls,
transfers, ditches, and steals—on which they can build subtle
touches, a word, or a way of touching the cards, that make a
trick hit. Vernon pushed magicians to use more natural
gestures, rather than sweeping, theatrical ones, that could
manipulate the minds of the viewers as much as the objects they
were moving.

“If I do a little sleight of hand such that the coin that was in my
hand is now not in my hand, when I open it, and you didn’t
catch it, you think—‘Oh wow, okay, that was a surprise,’” Levine
explained. “But if you can get someone to a place where they
viscerally feel that there’s a coin in my hand, deep in the back of
their head they feel that it’s there, their brain has locked in on
that assumption. Then I open the hand, and it’s like their mind
does the magic.”

But people came to Coney Island to see grand illusions, not

close-up magic, and today this place traffics in different kinds of
larger-than-life thrills: rides, kitschy haunted houses, parades of
mermaids. On the day we visited, the roller coasters were
running, full of delighted kids, but the maze-like corridors of
carnival games, hardly changed over a century, were a ghost
town. To the extent there’s magic to be found, it’s at the Coney
Island Museum, where magicians perform weekly on a stage on
the second floor. Out front, a poster advertises a magic show.
But when we peeked inside, there was little evidence of the
magic community of old.
Our tour through New York passed from the Lower East Side,
where new and old versions of the city sit side-by-side, to Coney
Island, a simulacrum of its former self, to Brooklyn Heights,
which feels like it hasn’t changed much in the past century.
Starting around 1916, small cadres of magicians made their way
down Remsen Street, past the same stately brownstones that
still stand there, to see something amazing on the second floor
of a chemist’s carriage house.

Amateur magicians were always part of the culture of backroom

magic, and one of them, Samuel Cox Hooker, created a show so
spectacular that for years many magicians had relegated it to
the world of myth. Hooker was an imposing, detail-oriented
man who, in his day job at a sugar refining company, essentially
created the American beet sugar industry. He also collected
scientific books and had an interest in photography, as well as
an affinity for magic. But among magicians, he’s remembered
for creating one of the strangest and most mysterious tricks ever
devised: the Hooker Rising Cards.

Behind his Brooklyn home, Hooker had a detached carriage

house, where he built a lab on the first floor and a small stage on
the second, with room for an audience of 20 or fewer—almost
always amateur or professional magicians. The stage was set
sparsely, with a few small, round tables. On one of them was a
houlette, a small frame that held a single deck of cards,
vertically, with the face of the front card exposed to the
audience. A chosen card starts to slide up, seemingly of its own
accord, from the middle of the deck, gradually revealing its face.
In theory, this trick is easy to perform. In its simplest version,
the magician uses a hidden finger to push the last card in the
deck slowly upward.

Hooker’s show was 90 minutes of rising card variations. He

placed a deck in the houlette and a joker would rise, and then
bob up and down, evading his grasp. An audience member
would name a number, and that number of cards immediately
rose from the deck. Hooker would borrow a deck from the
audience—surely most of them had decks handy—and place it in
the houlette; a selected card would rise. Members of the
audience would call out cards, and the cards would rise. The
whole deck would rise. Later in the show, Hooker upped the
apparent difficulty. He put the houlette under a bell jar or on a
book lifted up by three small legs, and he even suspended it
from the ceiling on ribbons. He had the joker rise clear out of
the deck and into the air. Throughout the performance Hooker
would chat with the disembodied head of a toy bear named
Miltiades III, who himself moved, floated, and helped Hooker
read minds.

The magicians in the audience knew how a trick like this was
supposed to work, with a secret string or lever or wheel. But
Hooker had them mystified. Over the course of the show,
Hooker kept adding conditions—variables—that should have
made the trick increasingly impossible to perform. In fact, he
called the show “Impossibilities.” No one ever guessed how it
was done, and Hooker kept the secret close, training just a few
people to perform the act before his death in 1935.

When we reached his address, the house, with a black door and
brick front, had a looming presence, though nothing in
particular distinguishes it from others on the block. Levine
knows magicians who’ve driven past, curious to see the place
that so many left baffled, but none have seen inside. So we
decided to ring the front doorbell.

To our surprise, one of the current owners of Hooker’s house

opened the door and invited us in. She preferred not to give her
name, but she said she knows that there once was a magic show
there and that Houdini had some connection to the house. She
would have led us out back to the carriage house if there were
anything to see, she added, but when they moved in a decade
ago, whatever apparatus was used for the trick had already been
stripped out. In ten years, no one’s come by to ask about it.
There’s no magic left but memory.

We rounded the corner to skirt down the back alley and take a
quick look at the carriage house anyway. (By New York
standards, it’s a gigantic space, larger than many decent
apartments.) “Houdini got fooled,” said Levine, animated over
Hooker's prowess. “This guy comes up with the most genius
magic tricks, and then it's … ‘Oh yeah, Houdini used to come
here.’ He came to be a spectator.”

Most people know only a few magicians by name, and Houdini

is often first among them. Some magicians love him, but others
see him as a genius self-promoter rather than a talented
magician. “Houdini didn’t do any magic,” Vernon once said in
an interview. “He did escapes! There’s nothing strange to seeing
a guy get out of a straitjacket.”

Vernon wasn’t being entirely fair. Before making his name as an

escape artist, Houdini performed card tricks, and he prided
himself on his ability to suss out the method behind any card
trick if he could see it performed three times. In February 1922,
when he was at a magician’s meeting in Chicago, Vernon
approached him with a challenge.

Vernon had Houdini write his initials on a card and place it

back in the deck. In a split second, Vernon made the card rise to
the top of the pile and revealed it. Houdini had no idea how it
happened.

In some versions of this story, Houdini placed the card second

from the top. In another, he placed it at various spots within the
deck. All versions agree that Vernon performed the trick seven
times, and Houdini was stumped. From then on, Vernon piggy-
backed on Houdini’s talent for promotion and advertised
himself as “The Man Who Fooled Houdini.”
Today, the method behind this trick—a switch, a gesture that
exchanges one card for another, or a gaff, a specially made
version of an object—is no longer a secret. It’s easy enough to
find the details online, although among magicians it’s still
considered gauche to talk openly about exactly which switch or
which gaff can be used. But the Hooker Rising Cards remain a
mystery, even to most magicians, with only a few select people
in on the trick. Sometimes, the secret behind a trick is that there
isn’t just one secret, but a series of them that a magician can
swap out as circumstances dictate. And once you’ve astounded
an audience, even one composed entirely of magicians, it
becomes easier to keep fooling them.

By the 1930s, Vernon was at the center of his own group of

magicians, both professional and amateur, who had come to
revere him as the best close-up magician in the world. Along
with one of his students, a well-off lawyer named Garrick
Spencer, he started his own magic organization, the Academy of
the Art of Magic, which planned to assemble the most
accomplished magicians into a league of honor. By then, the
primary forum for magic had shifted again. Vaudeville had
fallen to radio and, eventually, television. The Great Depression
had stripped the middle class of money to spend on leisure at
places like Coney Island. Soon the Hippodrome, the Midtown
theater where Houdini had famously made an elephant vanish,
would be torn down and replaced with an office building.
Martinka’s had merged with another magic shop, and in 1938
Flosso, the Coney Island magician, bought it and changed the
name to the Flosso-Hornmann Magic Shop.

Magicians found refuge in nightclubs, classier versions of the

beer halls that had preceded vaudeville. Elaborate illusions were
on the outs again, as magicians were often left exposed in the
middle of a dance floor, backed by a band. “You were
surrounded,” says Levine. “The acts had to be lightweight and
attention-grabbing.”

In the late 1930s, Spencer had been urging Vernon to develop

an act that he could take to a famous nightclub—the Rainbow
Room at Rockefeller Center. Vernon was used to performing in
rarified settings; for many years before the Depression he had
worked parties for some of New York’s wealthiest people. But he
wasn’t a stage magician. With Spencer’s urging (and money) he
developed an elaborate routine, his “Harlequin Act,” in which
he portrayed a commedia dell’arte character, a medieval demon
of sorts. Choreographed to classical music, the routine updated
classic tricks—the cups and balls, the linking rings, changing
gloves into a dove.
The act premiered in 1938, and at first it was a success.
Newspapers hailed Vernon as card master who’d finally figured
out how to communicate his genius on a larger scale. A one-
week engagement at the Rainbow Room was extended to more
than two months.

Unlike Pastor’s theaters, or Dreamland, or Hooker’s private

venue, the Rainbow Room still exists, in a form. It’s now an
event space, available for rent. Not that long ago, Levine
performed there himself at a fundraising gala, where magicians
walked the floor, approaching small groups of guests. In that
situation, lightweight tricks that can be held in a magician’s
hands and pocket work best: Levine might guess a card
someone has picked from a deck, or have them think about their
favorite book from childhood and divine what it is. The space
still has room for more dramatic stage sets, though, and another
magician made a person levitate into the air.

But Vernon’s success at new venues was short-lived. When he

tried to scale the act up, to perform at Radio City Music Hall, it
didn’t work. He was disappointed, but the purist and
experimentalist in him was also bored. He didn’t like doing the
same show over and over; he felt his own limits as a performer.
He was happier tracking down a new sleight-of-hand technique
from card shops. Just like in his Coney Island days, he preferred
to do magic without muddling it with show business.

In the 1940s and '50s, he performed close-up magic on cruise

ships and at parties, and he started giving lecturers to other
magicians. He shared some of his never-before-seen techniques,
and always pressed on the idea that magic should look as
natural as possible. He rethought age-old tricks, and the
versions he created became canon. “If you see someone do the
cups and balls or linking rings or any card trick, most of the
time, they’re doing his version,” says Levine. At that time, in
New York’s back rooms and the restaurants that magicians
haunted, Vernon was the one who determined who had the
opportunity to gather around insiders’ tables.

In the 1960s, he moved west, to Los Angeles, where he took up

residence at a private magician’s club, the Magic Castle. “When
he lived in New York, New York was the epicenter of insider
magic,” says Levine. “And when he moved to Los Angeles … ”
Vernon took the center of gravity with him.

“All of my memories of magic are—I was already obsessed with

it,” Levine says. There’s a video of him at age five, giving a magic
show using tricks from a kit. “I didn’t know how to do any of the
stuff,” he says. “But I kind of have the schtick down, like—‘You,
over there, you pick this card.’”
He met the current owner of Tannen’s, Adam Blumenthal, when
both were early teenagers, attending the magic camp the shop
still runs each summer. Back then, most people assumed a
young magician’s dream was to have a television special like one
of David Copperfield’s. “Sleight of hand was just a thing
magicians did to amuse themselves or entertain people before
or after a show,” says Levine. When he got excited about close-
up magic, the type of tricks Vernon obsessed over, it wasn’t for
its commercial potential. But in recent years, sleight of hand has
become more popular. David Blaine’s Street Magic, which
filmed audiences’ reactions to close-up magic, showed how it
could work on television. And it’s also the perfect type of magic
for the quick-hit YouTube age.

“You can do a lot of things, when you can drop out of frame,”
said Blumenthal, standing behind the counter at Tannen’s.
Outside the Midtown building where Tannen’s is hidden, there’s
no hint of what you’ll find upstairs—no window full of tricks, no
sign, no poster. On the sixth floor, the elevator opens into a
white hallway, and the store is around the corner and at the end
of the hall. After our day walking through the city, the shop was
dark and cool. People bustled in and out, as Levine ducked into
the back room and returned. Two young magicians came in,
planted themselves at the center table, and started working with
decks of cards. “But there’s also a lot of things that don’t work
for camera,” Blumenthal continued. “The camera doesn’t blink.
And context is really important. The kind of things that Noah
can do in a show are also different than the things you’re going
to do socially at a bar.”
Steeped as it is in oral history, magic is full of legends, and when
Levine first came here, he didn’t quite believe the story that the
Flosso-Hornmann Magic Shop had once been located in the
same building. But then one day a long-time building employee
asked him if Jackie—Flosso’s son, who took over the business—
was still around. The old elevator operator once asked
Blumenthal about it, too. That store had its own mythology: two
counters against a white wall, piled with magic stuff and
navigable only by the employees, who decided what you needed
when you visited. Blumenthal worked out that it must have
closed just a few years before Tannen’s moved in. Today the
spot where it was located is a blank wall, right next to Tannen’s.
Levine designed his afterhours show specifically for Tannen’s,
and he imagined the first half would be the best version of what
it can be like to visit a magic shop. In the second half, after he
whisks away the magic books, he gathers the audience around
the black table in the center of the room, to give, he says, a sense
of what it’s like to be in the back room. He talks about Vernon
and a trick in which he scattered a deck of cards off a boat and
into the water. Only one card landed face up—the one that
Vernon had chosen. Levine then explains the holy grail of
backroom magic—to make a card appear without touching the
deck. As he speaks, he makes no mention of what his hands are
doing—moving cards around the table with a pen alone.

At the end of the night, he performs a version of “any card at

any number.” An audience member thinks of a card, and Levine
asks another to pick a number—31, in this case—and then he
counts down as he deals cards from the deck. He turns over the
31st card, and the audience member assents: That’s the card.
We may not know what the secret is behind the trick, or any of
the amazing things that magicians can do today, absent
theatricality and a dedicated stage, but we know exactly where
to find it: somewhere in the back room.