Houdini Monument

Los Angeles, California

Although it looks old, this monument to Harry Houdini, dead for nearly 100 years, was erected in the summer of 2021. It features a large, scowling head of the famous magician and escape artist atop a rock pedestal with a bronze plaque embellished with a pair of handcuffs and the quote, "No prison can hold me; no hand of leg irons or steel locks can shackle me. No ropes or chains can keep me from my freedom."

The scowling head had previously been on the gated property of the adjacent Houdini Estate, and not accessible to the general public. Now it is.

The monument has the appearance of an impressive Golden Era Hollywood roadside tombstone, but in fact Harry Houdini is buried 3,000 miles away, in a Jewish cemetery in Queens, New York, and some Houdini experts believe that he never lived on the Houdini Estate property at all, though perhaps at another house that had been on Laurel Canyon Boulevard, during film production in 1919.