SCRANTON - These days, it's best known as the setting of the quirky TV sitcom The Office, or as Electric City, because it operated the first electric trolley system.

But it was daredevil Harry Houdini who lured me here - and he's been dead for 83 years. Now, that's a magic trick.

It started as a day trip for my husband, Frank, and myself to explore the Houdini Museum - touted as the only building in the world devoted to the famous escapologist - with our grandson, Christopher, 12.

And it expanded to a Weekend Journey a few weeks later, to tour this city of more than 70,000 that's enjoying a cultural renaissance, with historic sites that celebrate the industrial past; glorious, restored buildings; and a vibrant ethnic diversity.

The inside of the Houdini Museum looks like a dusty antique store, but the jumble of exciting memorabilia lining the walls includes a milk can large enough to hide a magician, a collection of locks and handcuffs, and a well-worn straitjacket.

Houdini's legacy is kept alive by devoted proprietors Dick Brooks, who performs as Bravo the Great, and Dorothy Dietrich, billed as one of the world's leading female magicians. Brooks provides a detailed biography of the magician, from his birth as Ehrich Weiss in Budapest, Hungary, in 1874 to his mysterious death on Halloween in 1926 at age 52. And he injects little-known facts, such as that during World War I, Houdini taught U.S. soldiers how to escape from German handcuffs. As Houdini liked to say, "My brain is the key that sets me free."

Brooks leads us into the high-ceilinged theater, where we watch rare film footage of Houdini freeing himself from a straitjacket and surviving the famous Chinese Water Torture Cell. Exciting stuff, priming us for some live magic.

My husband and I do not expect much, but Bravo the Great and Dorothy put on a top-notch show, using doves, a rabbit, a duck, and two poodles. And they pull a boy out of the audience for an amazing levitation trick that my husband is still pondering.

Only one nagging question remains: What was Houdini's connection to Scranton? It turns out the Poli Theater was a popular stop on the vaudeville circuit, where Houdini joined such stars as Fred Astaire and Groucho Marx. In fact, Scranton supposedly was one of Houdini's favorite venues, so maybe he knew something about Scranton that was worth our making a return trip.

Mary Ann Moran Savakinus, director of the Lackawanna Historical Society, gives us the city's history in a nutshell:

"The industrial boom was fueled by the holy trinity of iron, rail, and coal." In 1847, brothers Selden T. and George W. Scranton were the first to mass-produce iron rails in America. Their iron-manufacturing business was short-lived, but coal stayed hot. With local fields containing 85 percent of the world's anthracite coal, the family shifted to railroading to transport those "black diamonds" around the country.

By 1900, Scranton had grown into the 38th-largest city in the country, with a population of more than 100,000, and families such as the Scrantons had joined the so-called robber barons of the era.

But the city's story is not just about the wealthy. Industrial growth required labor, and immigrants poured into the city to fill the jobs. The Irish and the Welsh were among the earliest arrivals, followed by Eastern Europeans and Italians.

"Having mined anthracite coal in their native country, the Welsh were a perfect match for the Pennsylvania mines," Moran Savakinus says. "Back then, Scranton had the largest Welsh population outside of Wales itself."

After World War II, coal was displaced by cheaper fuels - oil and natural gas - and the city's fortunes faded.

The city boomed as a major rail hub in the late 1800s, with the most railroad tracks per square mile in the country. So we start our Weekend Journey at Steamtown, a national historic site.

Anchoring the heart of the compact downtown (about six square blocks), Steamtown is dedicated to preserving the era of the steam locomotive. It's a working roundhouse, where restored steam engines are serviced and prepared so tourists can ride authentic steam-powered trains.