Collyer brothers

Homer Lusk Collyer (November 6, 1881 – March 21, 1947) and Langley Collyer (October 3, 1885 – March 1947) were two American brothers who became famous because of their snobbish nature, filth in their homes, and compulsive hoarding.

The brothers are often cited as an example of compulsive hoarding associated with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), as well as disposophobia or Collyer brothers syndrome, a fear of throwing anything away. For decades, neighborhood rumors swirled around the rarely-seen, unemployed men and their home at 2078 Fifth Avenue (at the corner of 128th Street), in Manhattan, where they obsessively collected newspapers, books, furniture, musical instruments, and many other items, with booby-traps set up in corridors and doorways to protect against intruders.

Both were eventually found dead in the Harlem brownstone where they had lived as hermits, surrounded by over 100 tons of rubbish that they had amassed over several decades.

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Family

  The Collyer brothers were sons of Herman Livingston Collyer (1857–1923), a Manhattan gynecologist, and Susie Gage Frost (1856–1929); the Collyer family traced its roots to the Mayflower in the 17th century. They had a sister, Susan, who died as an infant in 1880. The family lived in a three-story townhouse at 2078 Fifth Avenue at the corner of 128th Street in Harlem, New York City, New York. The family was well educated and both sons attended Columbia University, which had just relocated to its present-day Morningside Heights campus, about a twenty-minute walk from the Collyer house. Much of the area was still semirural; the first New York City Subway, the IRT, opened only in 1904 and still had not been extended this far uptown. Homer obtained a degree in engineering, while Langley became an Admiralty lawyer, although he preferred being an inventor. Homer also played the piano and became a self-styled musician with long, flowing hair, which was a rarity in this era. Over the years, as both brothers' eccentricities intensified, Langley tinkered with various inventions, such as a device to vacuum the insides of pianos and a Model T Ford adapted to generate electricity.

Dr. Herman Collyer abandoned his family in 1909, and the two brothers, still in their twenties, continued living in the house with their mother. When Herman died in 1923, his wife inherited all of his furniture, medical equipment and books and moved them to the Harlem house. Their mother died in 1929 and the brothers inherited everything. But over the previous fifteen years or so, Harlem had changed drastically. When Dr. Collyer moved into the house at 2078 Fifth Avenue, the neighborhood had been a mixture of middle-class and well-to-do, whose townhouses had themselves gradually displaced much larger 19th-century estates owned by eminent figures such as James Roosevelt, father of Franklin D. Roosevelt. Manhattan's African American community was displaced from its primary location in the late 19th century--the now nonexistent tenderloin and San Juan Hill--at the same time that real-estate overspeculation caused by over enthusiasm from the creation of the NYC subway left Harlem filled with vacant homes. Though African-Americans had lived in Harlem since its founding, the conjunction of these two events, along with increased migration from the southern United States led to a significant alteration in Harlem's racial makeup. During and after World War I, the black population of New York quickly increased; this in conjunction with white flight made central Harlem virtually all black by the 1920s. By this time the Collyer brothers, though only in their forties, had long since ensconced themselves in their townhouse. As the neighborhood's character changed, the brothers became an anachronistic curiosity and withdrew from the world at large even further.

Recluses

Burglars tried to break into the house because of unfounded rumors of valuables, and neighborhood youths had developed a fondness for throwing rocks at the windows. As the brothers' fears increased, so did their eccentricity. They boarded up the windows, and Langley set about using his engineering skills to set up booby traps. Their gas, telephone, electricity and water having been turned off because of their failure to pay the bills, the brothers took to warming the large house using only a small kerosene heater. For a while, Langley attempted to generate his own energy by means of a car engine. Langley began to wander outside at night; he fetched their water from a post in a park four blocks to the south (presumably Mount Morris Park, renamed Marcus Garvey Park in 1973). He also dragged home countless pieces of abandoned junk that aroused his interest. In 1933, Homer, already crippled by rheumatism, went blind. Langley devised a remedy, a diet of one hundred oranges a week, along with black bread and peanut butter.

Public scrutiny

The Collyer brothers were first mentioned in the newspapers in 1938, when they rebuffed a real estate agent who had been eyeing the house. The New York Times repeated neighborhood rumors that the brothers lived in some sort of "Orientalist splendor" and were sitting on vast piles of cash, afraid to deposit it in a bank. Neither rumor was true; the brothers were certainly not broke, although eventually they would have been since neither of them had worked for decades. They drew media attention again in 1942 when they got in trouble with the bank after refusing to pay the mortgage on their house. In 1942, the New York Herald Tribune interviewed Langley. In response to a query about the bundles of newspapers, Langley replied, "I am saving newspapers for Homer, so that when he regains his sight he can catch up on the news." The Bowery Savings Bank began eviction procedures and sent over a cleanup crew. At this time, Langley began ranting at the workers, prompting the neighbors to summon the police. When the police attempted to force their way by smashing down the front door, they were stymied by a sheer wall of junk piled from the floor to the ceiling. Without comment, Langley made out a check for $6,700 (equivalent to about $90,000 in 2006), paying off the mortgage in full in a single payment. He ordered everyone off the premises, and withdrew from outside scrutiny once more, emerging only at night and when he wanted to file criminal complaints against housebreakers.

Homer Collyer found dead

  On March 21, 1947, an anonymous tipster phoned the 122nd police precinct and insisted there was a dead body in the house. A patrol officer was dispatched, but had a very difficult time getting into the house at first. There was no doorbell or telephone and the doors were locked; and while the basement windows were broken, they were protected by iron grillwork. Eventually an emergency squad of seven men had no choice but to begin pulling out all the junk that was blocking their way and throw it out onto the street below. (Manhattan's streets have no alleys, so all trash removal is done in front.) The brownstone's foyer was packed solid by a wall of old newspapers, folding beds and chairs, half a sewing machine, boxes, parts of a wine press and numerous other pieces of junk. A patrolman, William Baker, finally broke in through a window into a second-story bedroom. Behind this window lay, among other things, more packages and newspaper bundles, empty cardboard boxes lashed together with rope, the frame of a baby carriage, a rake, and old umbrellas tied together. After a two-hour crawl he found Homer Collyer dead, wearing just a tattered blue and white bathrobe. Homer's matted, grey hair reached down to his shoulders, and his head was resting on his knees.

Assistant Medical Examiner Dr. Arthur C. Allen confirmed Homer's identity and said that the elder brother had been dead for no more than ten hours; consequently, Homer could not have been the source of the stench wafting from the house. Foul play was ruled out: Homer had died from the combined effects of malnutrition, dehydration and cardiac arrest. By this time, the mystery had attracted a crowd of about 600 onlookers, curious about the junk and the smell. But Langley was nowhere to be found.

In their quest to find Langley, the police began searching the house, an arduous task that required them to remove the large quantity of junk amassed in the house. Most of it was deemed worthless and set out curbside for the sanitation department to haul away; a few items were put into storage. The ongoing search turned up a further assortment of guns and ammunition. For weeks there was no sign of Langley.

Manhunt

On Saturday, March 30, false rumors circulated that Langley had been seen aboard a bus heading for Atlantic City, but a manhunt along the New Jersey shore turned up nothing. Two days later, the police continued searching the house, removing 3,000 more books, several outdated phone books, a horse's jawbone, a Steinway piano, an early X-ray machine, and even more bundles of newspapers. More than nineteen tons of junk had been removed, just from the ground floor of the three-story brownstone. Still unable to find Langley, the police continued to clear away the brothers' stockpile for another week, removing another 84 tons of rubbish from the house. Although a good deal of the junk had come from their father's medical practice, a considerable portion was discarded items, collected by Langley on his various forays over the years.

Langley Collyer found dead

On April 8, 1947, workman Artie Matthews found the dead body of Langley Collyer just ten feet from where Homer had died. His partially decomposed body was being eaten by rats. A suitcase and three huge bundles of newspapers covered his body. Langley had been crawling through their newspaper tunnel to bring food to his paralyzed brother when one of his own booby traps fell down and crushed him. Homer, blind and paralyzed, starved to death several days later. The stench detected on the street had been emanating from Langley, the younger brother.

House contents

  In total, police and workmen took 103 tons of garbage out of the house. What was salvageable from it fetched less than $2,000 at auction; the cumulative estate of the Collyer brothers was valued at $91,000, of which $20,000 worth was in the form of personal property (jewelry, cash, securities and the like).

Items removed from the house included rope, baby carriages, a doll carriage, rakes, umbrellas, rusted bicycles, old food, potato peelers, a collection of guns, glass chandeliers, bowling balls, camera equipment, the folding top of a horse-drawn carriage, a sawhorse, three dressmaking dummies, painted portraits, pinup girl photos, plaster busts, Mrs. Collyer's hope chests, rusty bed springs, the kerosene stove, a checkerboard, a child's chair (the brothers had been lifelong bachelors and childless), more than 25,000 books (including thousands of books about medicine and engineering and more than 2,500 on law), human organs pickled in jars, eight live cats, a beaded lampshade, the chassis of the old Model T Langley had been tinkering with, one British and six American flags, tapestries, hundreds of yards of unused silks and fabric, clocks, fourteen pianos (both grand and upright), a clavichord, two organs, banjos, violins, bugles, accordions, a gramophone and records, and, of course, countless bundles of newspapers and magazines, some of them decades old. Near the spot where Homer had died, police also found 34 bank account passbooks with a total of $3,007.18.

And in addition to the bundles of paper, there was a great deal of garbage. The house itself, having never been maintained, was also decaying: the roof was leaking and some walls had already caved in, showering bricks and mortar on the rooms below. Eventually the house was torn down as a fire hazard.

Burial

Both brothers were buried with their parents at Cypress Hills Cemetery, Brooklyn.

Legacy

The New York Times on March 26, 1947 wrote:

There is, admittedly, something unattractive about the avidity with which society now pores over every detail the Collyer brothers vigorously withheld from public scrutiny... It is almost as though society were taking revenge upon the brothers for daring to cut the thread that binds man to his fellows.

The Collyer brothers were first fictionalized by Marcia Davenport in her novel, My Brother's Keeper (Scribners, 1954), also published as a Popular Library paperback. In his novel 'Salem's Lot (1975), Stephen King made use of the Collyer brother's story in his description of the bundles of magazines and newspapers that were found in the Marsten House, including using said bundled newspapers rigged to fall as a booby trap to guard against burglars. Despite motion picture options spanning decades, the Davenport novel has never been filmed. More recently, the Collyer brothers appeared as characters in Hirohiko Araki's 2004 comic The Lives of Eccentrics, and in Kevin Baker's 2006 novel, Striver's Row.

The Collyer Brothers at Home is a 1980 play by Mark St. Germain, and the brothers have also been the subjects of two other English-language plays: The Dazzle, by Richard Greenberg, loosely based on their lives, and Clutter: The True Story of the Collyer Brothers Who Never Threw Anything Out by Mark Saltzman. There is also a Swedish play called Samlarna (The Hoarders), by Lotta Lotass, which has not been translated to English.

The site of the former Collyer house is now a park.

See also

• Edmund Trebus, British compulsive hoarder
• Hetty Green, Boston miser

References

• Franz Lidz, Ghosty Men: The Strange but True Story of the Collyer Brothers, New York's Greatest Hoarders: An Urban Historical New York: Bloomsbury USA, 2003. ISBN 1-58234-311-X
• The New York Times, August 16, 1923, page 15, "Obituary Herman L. Collyer"
• The New York Times, April 5, 1939, page 26, "Gas company seizes meters of 'hermits'"
• The New York Times, August 5, 1942, page 21, "Mortgage on recluses' home is foreclosed, but legendary brothers still hide within "
• The New York Times, August 8, 1942, page 13, "Bank and Collyers declare a truce"
• The New York Times, September 30, 1942, page 24, "Collyer mansion keeps its secrets"
• The New York Times, October 2, 1942, page 27, "Order ejects Collyers"
• The New York Times, November 19, 1942, page 27, "Collyers pay off $6,700 mortgage as evictors smash way into home"
• The New York Times, November 21, 1942, page 24, "Collyers get deed to home"
• The New York Times, February 3, 1943, page 21, "Collyers may lose house"
• The New York Times, February 4, 1943, page 24, "Government gets Collyer property"
• The New York Times, July 27, 1946, page 16, "Subpoena flushes Harlem recluse"
• The New York Times, January 28, 1947, page 25, "Hermit brothers get $7,500 award"
• The New York Times, March 22, 1947, page 01, "Homer Collyer, Harlem recluse, found dead at 70. Police require two hours to break into 5th Avenue home, booby-trapped with junk brother fails to appear investigators think, however, he may be 'Charles Smith' who summoned them. Homer Collyer found dead at 70 as police forced entrance into home of recluses. Homer Collyer was found dead yesterday in his decaying brownstone house at 2078 Fifth Avenue, but the legend of the two recluse Collyer brothers still lives on."
• The New York Times, March 26, 1947, page C24, "The Collyer mystery. To patrolmen on the midnight-to-eight tour, who sometimes chatted with Langley Collyer on his nocturnal strolls, he seemed, for all his shabbiness, a well-mannered and cultured old gentleman. They probably never thought that some day the entire Police Department would be on the lookout for him."
• The New York Times, March 27, 1947, page 56, "Langley Collyer is dead"
• The New York Times, April 2, 1947, page 38, "53 attend burial of Homer Collyer; 2 Harlem Neighbors Present, but Langley Does Not Appear -- Police Press Search. Homer Collyer was buried yesterday in the family plot in Cypress Hills Cemetery, Queens."
• The New York Times, April 9, 1947, page 1, "Body of Collyer Is Found Near Where Brother Died. Langley Collyer was found dead yesterday in his old brownstone home at 2078 Fifth Avenue. His body, wedged in a booby trap set to keep out intruders, was lying in the same room on the second floor where his blind brother, Homer, had been found dead on March 21.
• The New York Times, April 12, 1947, page 15, "Langley Collyer buried"
• Time; April 7, 1947; page 27, "The Shy Men" [1]