escape artist

He was a runner and escape artist.

The escape room industry has exploded over the last decade, with an estimated 2,000 facilities in the U.S., according to a 2023 industry report from Room Escape Artist, an enthusiast site that maintains a running database of every known room in the country.

There’s so much potential in the 35-acre expanse that dates to the 1880s and was once a symbol of municipal pride, as well as a setting for Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton movies and for a stunt in which escape artist Harry Houdini jumped into the lake in chains.

You want to solve them not for the sake of the puzzles themselves but for the sake of the character and the story,” says Lisa Spira, co-founder of Room Escape Artist, a site dedicated to the escape room sector.

Love him or hate him — and there’s little in between — they have long considered him an escape artist through career-spanning thickets of legal, business and political thorns.