John Dominic Kodet was born Jan Kodet August 3, 1875 in Bohemia, then part of Austria. He emigrated to the United States in 1880 with his parents Josef and Josefa, and three siblings. Kodet claimed in a 1921 Billboard article to have been in the museum business since he was a boy under the tutelage of Professor Worth of Worth’s Dime Museum on 14th Street. The 1900 census lists John’s occupation as “pool parlor” worker, perhaps his start in the amusement business. By 1901 he was known to be a manager of professional wrestlers and worked in this capacity until at least 1907. Kodet opened his penny arcade in Harlem in 1913. By 1917 the enterprise was called The Harlem Arcade Nickelodeum Museum and was located at 152-156 125th Street in New York City. While both Bernsteins’s Gaiety and The Globe Dime Museum in the Bowery were still struggling on, The Harlem Museum was soon New York’s only dime museum. The great and storied Huber’s Museum on 14th Street had closed in 1906. Kodet operated the Harlem Museum very successfully until about 1925 when he fell ill, and the museum closed temporarily. Kodet was also a well-known purveyor of curios, taxidermy, and museum exhibits, and advertised these items for sale in The Billboard throughout the 1920s. When The Harlem Museum reopened after Kodet’s illness it had a new owner and management, and seems to have continued operations without Kodet until about 1935. Though Kodet had a son and two daughters, he himself is nowhere to be found after about 1925. Well-known in the show world in his lifetime, Kodet is all but forgotten today. Neither Kodet’s obituary or death date is known, though there is a John Kodet buried in St. Michael’s Cemetary in Queens who was born August 7, 1881, and who died in 1944. Other than the possibility this could be our John Kodet, we have no further information about what happened to the great showman.