Hollywood Roots: Gilda, Houdini and Lucy’s Detroit
Three stops, from a University District street to a Wyandotte lot, where a comedian grew up, a magician took his last bow and a TV legend lost her father.
- Stops 3
- Time Two hours, give or take
- Cost Free guide
- Best by Car
The guide is free. Admission, food, drinks and parking along the way are on you.
This is a short drive-by route, north to south: about twenty minutes from Wildemere to downtown, then another half hour down to Wyandotte. One stop is a private home, so stay on the sidewalk; the other two are sites where the original buildings are long gone. We haven’t been to any of these three stops yet, so every one is marked, and we’d love your help with them.
Stop 1
Gilda Radner’s Childhood Home
The connectionGilda Radner’s childhood homeVisitingSidewalk onlyOur visitNot yet
Start on Wildemere, in the University District, a neighborhood of solid brick houses just down from the Detroit Golf Club. Gilda Radner was born in Detroit on June 28, 1946, and grew up on this street. Her father, Herman, ran Detroit’s Seville Hotel, where touring performers stayed, and he took her to Broadway shows in New York. He developed a brain tumor when she was 12 and died two years later.
She went to the Liggett School, then a girls’ school on Burns Avenue on the east side (it moved to Grosse Pointe Woods the year she graduated, 1964, and later became University Liggett), then to the University of Michigan, where she did the weather on the campus radio station. In 1975 she became the first performer cast on Saturday Night Live, one of the original seven, and gave the world Roseanne Roseannadanna, Emily Litella and Baba Wawa. She won an Emmy in 1978.
She died of ovarian cancer in 1989, at 42. Gilda’s Club, the cancer support network named for her, carries on her name. This is a private home. Stay on the sidewalk.
Stop 2
Harry Houdini’s Last Performance (Garrick Theatre Site)
The connectionHoudini’s last performance, October 24, 1926VisitingDemolished — site onlyOur visitNot yet
Head downtown to Griswold Street. The Garrick Theatre opened here in 1887 as Whitney’s New Grand Opera House, designed by the Chicago theater architect J.M. Wood, and by the 1920s it was a stop for touring shows.
Harry Houdini arrived in Detroit on October 24, 1926, already badly hurt. Two days earlier in Montreal, a student had punched him in the stomach, testing his boast that he could take any blow, and he’d been in pain ever since. He reached Detroit with a fever of about 104 degrees, refused the hotel doctor’s advice to go to the hospital, and did the show at the Garrick anyway. It was his last. He collapsed afterward, went into Grace Hospital, and died there in Room 401 on October 31, at 52.
The Garrick closed in 1928 and came down in early 1929, and another building has stood on the lot since. There’s no theater to see. Stand on Griswold, and remember that Detroit got the final act.
Full listing: Harry Houdini’s Last Performance (Garrick Theatre Site)Get directions
Stop 3
Lucille Ball’s Former Wyandotte Home
The connectionLucille Ball’s family home, about 1912–1915VisitingDemolished — site onlyOur visitNot yet
Finish downriver in Wyandotte, on Biddle Avenue. Lucille Ball was born in Jamestown, New York, on August 6, 1911, and her family moved here when she was about a year old. Her father, Henry Ball, was an electrician. The house was then 126 Biddle; the street was renumbered in 1928, which makes it 3738 today.
In 1915, when Lucy was 3, Henry died in the house of typhoid fever, at 27. The family was shunned, with a health department notice posted on the door, and her pregnant mother took the children back to New York. It’s a grim start for the woman who made I Love Lucy, and she came back to Wyandotte in 1947 to reconnect with a family that had helped them.
The house was torn down in 1963, so you’re visiting a site, not a building. Biddle runs along the river through downtown Wyandotte, which is worth a walk while you’re here.
Full listing: Lucille Ball’s Former Wyandotte HomeGet directions