Helen Granger Boss - Special Collections - University of Baltimore

BOSS; 056 1:2:28
They had a sort of a building there, I don't know what they used it
for. But I know when I was a girl, about eight or nine years old, I
saw Houdini get out of his workings down there. They threw him overboard•••
wasn't many peo:yle there at all. Even then (I was little then) I thought,
gee, any other time there'd be a big crowd here, but it wasn't. They
put him over in this trunk. Us kids, we had no other••• outside the movies
when they came along and they were a nickel •••but outside that•••we
didn't always have a nickel to go to the movies. But I say, I often
wondered why there wasn't more people that day and he was going to perform
like that. But I was real•••I knew he wasn't coming up. «chuckle» But
he did.
That was our Sunday walk, you know, over the Light Street Bridge.
They started building the new bridge -- the new Brooklyn bridge now, or
the Hanover Street bridge in 1917. That was started because it was
right before my father died. Now see, that was all boundary down there
where you could look across to these summer resorts where they had the
show and they had the dance pavilion and all and Mr. Kirby had the stage.
Naturally, he had an orchestra there, people would dance to it. That
was his amusement, more or less, because you could go to Mr. Slagle's
for beer and other refreshments. But then when you came down he only had
the stage and he sold fish sandwiches and things like that. Now on
this side of the bridge•••
Kupchyk: Which side was that?
Boss: On this side of the new bridge, Hanover Street bridge, this is
Cromwell Street, the lock insulator's way here almost at Light Street•••
Kupchyk: At the north end of Cromwell?
Boss: No, at the east end of Cromwell where the jerkwater came through