Tuesday marked the end of an era for the region's magic community. What's believed to be the last specialty magic store in New England closed its doors.
Magic stores are a lot more than just a place to buy a top hat and a rabbit to pull out of it, and the region's community of magicians are mourning the loss.
When a skilled magician performs a trick, one thing you can be sure of is there's something happening right in front of you that you're not seeing — a secret that you're not let in on. And magic shops were a little like that. They used to be scattered around, hidden in plain sight.
Vince DeAngelis used to spend most of his free time upstairs in a nondescript strip mall in Peabody, hanging out at Diamond's Magic. Then, five years ago, he quit his software job and bought the shop.
"My predecessor here never had a sign out front,” DeAngelis said. “Didn't have the name on the glass downstairs. So you had to know there was a magic shop here. You had to know exactly how to find it, and he liked it that way."
It added to the mystery, but it probably wasn't great for business. So when DeAngelis bought the shop, he added a sign.
As he showed the place off, he pointed to shelves of strange wooden boxes and glass cases full of coins that visibly change in an instant, balls that multiply in metal cups, and decks of cards that behave in odd and unexpected ways.
"And if we walk over here, we have a theater space," he said, looking at several rows of auditorium chairs pointing towards a small stage, for performances and lectures from experienced magicians.
The shop appealed to a wide range of customers, from sleight of hand artists to street magicians.
"Oh man,” he said. “We get jugglers, ventriloquists, clowns, escapologists, mentalists, gospel magic."
That's right, gospel magic. DeAngelis said sometimes priests would come in to pick up a trick.
"We had one — Jesus in the tomb. It was a packet card trick."
DeAngelis loved it all. But despite all those people coming in, the shop just wasn't profitable.
"At the time, I was married. Been divorced since. Probably not due to the shop, I like to think,” he said with a laugh. “So my needs are not that great. And I wasn't looking for a lavish lifestyle. I saw myself doing this until — not to retirement, because I didn't plan on retiring — until I died."
He started paying into the business from his own savings to keep it afloat. But it wasn't enough to keep up with the rent and the loans he took out to buy the shop.
On Tuesday, he officially closed Diamond's Magic.
"And now I feel bad because I have no magic shop to hang out at," he said.
For DeAngelis, who spent so much of his life and his personal savings here, it's a tough loss.
"Well, personally this is all I ever wanted to do,” he said. “I did not like my previous career. I found it very stressful, physically and emotionally and mentally. I had ulcers and high blood pressure, and just a kind of a sour attitude towards things. This has been wonderful."
As he spoke, Debbie O'Carroll walked in the shop, wearing a tiara and what looked like an Elizabethan dress with a big heart on the front. She had just come from the Big Apple Circus in Peabody.
"When people come into the tent, I'm there for an hour before the show,” she said. “And I do magic tricks for them, card magic, with a British accent ... because I'm the queen of hearts, you see," she added in a British accent.
O'Carroll said she's heartbroken the shop is closing. It’s somewhere she could come between shows just to relax in costume, and nobody would think twice about it.
“I'm one of them,” she said, as the door opened and several more magicians appeared.
This is one of the other things DeAngelis loves about the shop. Experienced magicians come in, sit around a table, swap old stories, order lunch, and answer questions from younger or newer magicians.
"It's like a public library,” DeAngelis said. “But with the characters in the books being there to explain them to you. I just came up with that analogy. I don't know whether that's accurate or not, but it feels like that."
One of those characters is Jim Rainho.
"I worked Revere Beach back when in the '40s. One of the sideshows,” Rainho said. “That's how far back I go."
Rainho started out as a magician's assistant at the sideshow and moved on to have his own career amazing people.
"Well I worked with a lot with fire,” he said. “I did fire eating which was, it still is, spectacular, to a point." He said he used to produce lit candles, seemingly from out of nowhere.
Rainho and the other magicians at Diamond’s Magic used to gather at a different shop — the Magic Art Studio in Watertown, owned by Boston magic legend Ray Goulet.
"To a large extent, Ray and his shop were the hub of Boston magic for many, many years," said mentalist John Bach, who would spend pretty much every Saturday at Goulet's shop, in a back room full of his huge collection of artifacts of magic history.
"You kind of had to be invited into that room,” Bach said. “And it might be that you just came to the shop often enough and Ray knew you were serious about magic. But once you were invited into that room, that was the first step of kind of meeting the regulars. And that's where all the magicians, professional magicians, would come and hang out."
You never knew when someone like David Copperfield might stop by to visit Goulet, and to learn from him.
"Ask [Goulet] about a particular move and he'd show you just one after the other, 14 different ways of doing that one move, because he knew them all," said Alan Wassilak, another regular.
The Boston magic community lost its central figure in 2017.
"[Goulet] passed away Saturday, October 7. Six thirty in the morning,” Goulet's friend, magician David Cresey remembered. “Terrible, terrible. We lost — lost a good friend."
The crew kept showing up at Goulet's shop every Saturday for awhile, but about a year after he died, the shop closed down for good. So they started coming to Diamond's Magic in Peabody on Saturdays. Now, this shop is closing, too.
"I think that's what's going to be missing now. With the death of the brick and mortar magic shop is a place to go and see magic and see magicians and meet them and talk to them, talk shop," said Bach.
There are some stores around that focus on other things and also sell some magic kits on the side. But DeAngelis says that's not the same as one that specializes in magic.
"We are the last, to my counting, the last magic shop in all of New England," DeAngelis said.
It's not that magic is dying. Because of shows like America's Got Talent, DeAngelis said there's been a resurgence of interest. The death of magic stores, he said, is partly the Internet's fault.
"It seems to me that the younger kids, who are very much still into magic, don't care about the live experience, don't care about meeting somebody, shaking their hand, getting their autograph,” he said. “They're happy to buy an autographed deck of cards from online or watch a downloaded lecture."
Sixteen-year-old Jacob Langtry walked in and started looking around the shop, trying to find something new to amaze people with. Langtry was visiting Boston from upstate New York, and said he does get most of his magic stuff online. But to him, visiting a shop like this is something special.
"Whenever we go to a city that has a magic shop, which is rare, I try to get there," he said. He didn't even realize how close he came to visiting a city — and a region — that has no magic shops.
Now, the mystery is where Massachusetts' magicians will go to swap old stories, learn some new ones, and share the secrets of the tricks behind the tricks.
Correction: An earlier version of this story incorrectly spelled David Cresey's name.
