Collyer brothers

Homer Lusk Collyer (November 6, 1881March 21, 1947) and Langley Wakeman Collyer (October 3, 1885), known as the Collyer brothers, were two American brothers who became infamous for their bizarre natures and compulsive hoarding. The two lived in seclusion in their Harlem brownstone at 2078 Fifth Avenue (at the corner of 128th Street) in New York City where they obsessively collected books, furniture, musical instruments, and myriad other items, with booby traps set up in corridors and doorways to crush intruders. Both died in their home in March 1947 and were found (Homer on March 21, Langley on April 8) surrounded by more than 140 tons () of collected items that they had amassed over several decades.

Since the 1960s, the site of the former Collyer house has been a pocket park, named for the brothers.

Family and education

The Collyer brothers were sons of Herman Livingston Collyer (1857–1923), a Manhattan gynecologist who worked at Bellevue Hospital, and his first cousin, Susie Gage Frost Collyer (1856–1929), a former opera singer. The brothers claimed that their ancestors had traveled to America from England on the Fortune, the ship that arrived in Massachusetts in 1621, a year after the Mayflower. The Collyers' mother and father were both descended from the Livingstons, a New York family with roots going back to the 18th century. Robert Livingston was the first of the Livingston family to immigrate to America in 1672 — 52 years after the Mayflower. In 1880, Herman and Susie had their first child, a daughter they named Susan, who died at four months old. The following year, on November 6, the couple's first son, Homer Lusk, was born. In 1885, their second son, Langley Wakeman, was born. Langley was also an accomplished concert pianist; he played professionally for a time and performed at Carnegie Hall. Langley was also a layman of the Trinity Church where the family had been parishioners since 1697.

In 1909, Herman Collyer moved the family into a four-story brownstone in the Harlem neighborhood at 2078 Fifth Avenue. Dr. Collyer was known to be eccentric and was said to frequently paddle down the East River in a canoe to the City Hospital on Blackwell's Island, where he occasionally worked, and then carry the canoe back to his home in Harlem after he came ashore on Manhattan Island.

Seclusion and hoarding

After their mother's death, the Collyer brothers continued to live together in the Harlem brownstone they had inherited. For the next four years, the brothers socialized with others and left their home on a regular basis. Homer continued to practice law while Langley worked as a piano dealer. Both also taught Sunday school at the Trinity Church. In 1933, Homer lost his eyesight due to hemorrhages in the back of his eyes. Langley quit his job to care for his brother and the two began to withdraw from society. When later asked why the two chose to shut themselves off from the world, Langley replied, "We don't want to be bothered."

As rumors about the brothers' unconventional lifestyle spread throughout Harlem, crowds began to congregate outside their home. The attention caused the brothers' fears to increase along with their eccentricities. After teenagers threw rocks at their windows, they boarded them up and wired the doors shut. After unfounded rumors spread throughout the neighborhood that the brothers' home contained valuables and large sums of money, several people attempted to burglarize the home. In an attempt to exclude burglars, Langley constructed booby traps and tunnels among the collection of items and trash that filled the house. The house soon became a maze of boxes, complicated tunnel systems consisting of junk and trash rigged with trip wires. The brothers lived in "nests" created amongst the debris that was piled to the ceiling . After Homer became paralyzed due to inflammatory rheumatism, he refused to seek professional medical treatment, because both brothers distrusted doctors. The brothers feared that if Homer sought medical attention, doctors would cut his optic nerve, leaving him permanently blind, and give him drugs that would hasten his death. Langley later told a reporter, "You must remember that we are the sons of a doctor. We have a medical library of 15,000 books in the house. We decided we would not call in any doctors. You see, we knew too much about medicine."

By the early 1930s, the Collyer brothers' brownstone had fallen into disrepair. Their telephone was disconnected in 1937 and was never reconnected, as the brothers said they had no one to talk to. Because the brothers failed to pay their bills, the electricity, water, and gas were turned off in 1938. A reporter who interviewed Langley in 1942 described him as a "soft-spoken old gentleman with a liking for privacy" who spoke in a "low, polite and cultivated voice". Since the Collyer brothers never paid any of their bills and stopped paying income taxes in 1931, the property was repossessed by the City of New York in 1943 to pay the $1,900 in back income taxes that the brothers owed. Langley protested the repossession of their property, saying that since they had no income, they should not have to pay income taxes.

While rumors and legends abounded in Harlem about the brothers, they came to wider attention when, in 1938, a story about their refusal to sell their home to a real estate agent for $125,000 appeared in The New York Times. Neither rumor was true; however, the brothers were not insolvent.

After The New York Times story ran, Helen Worden, a reporter from New York World-Telegram, became interested in the brothers and interviewed Langley (Worden would release a book about the brothers in 1954). Langley told Worden that he stopped playing piano professionally after performing at Carnegie Hall because "Paderewski followed me. He got better notices than I. What was the use of going on?" Langley explained that he dressed in shabby clothing, because "[T]hey would rob me if I didn't". That same year, New York Herald Tribune reporter Herbert Clyde Lewis interviewed Langley. In response to a query about the bundles of newspapers that were kept in the brothers' home, Langley replied, "I am saving newspapers for Homer, so that when he regains his sight he can catch up on the news."

In November 1942, the Bowery Savings Bank began eviction procedures and sent a cleanup crew to the home. Langley began yelling at the workers, prompting the neighbors to summon the police. When the police attempted to force their way into the home by smashing down the front door, they were stymied by a sheer wall of junk piled from floor to ceiling. They found Langley in a clearing he had made in the middle of the debris. He then ordered everyone off the premises, and withdrew from outside scrutiny once more, emerging only at night when he wanted to file criminal complaints against intruders, get food, or collect items that piqued his interest. The caller claimed that the smell of decomposition was emanating from the house.

The medical examiner confirmed Homer's identity and said that he had been dead for approximately ten hours. Police initially suspected that Langley Collyer was the man who phoned in the anonymous tip regarding his brother's death and theorized that he fled the house before police arrived. It was later discovered that, in fact, a neighbor had called police based on a rumor he had heard.

Langley Collyer's discovery

After the discovery of Homer's body, rumors began circulating that Langley had been seen aboard a bus heading for Atlantic City. A manhunt along the New Jersey shore turned up nothing. Reports of Langley sightings led police to a total of nine states. The police continued searching the house, removing 3,000 books, including several outdated phone books, a horse's jawbone, a Steinway piano, an early X-ray machine, and more bundles of newspapers. More than nineteen tons of junk were removed from the ground floor of the brownstone. The police continued to clear away the brothers' stockpile for another week, removing another eighty-four tons of trash and junk from the house. Although a good deal of the junk came from their father's medical practice, a considerable portion was discarded items collected by Langley over the years. Approximately 2,000 people stood outside the home to watch the clean-up effort. Langley was found in a two-foot (60 cm) wide tunnel lined with rusty bed springs and a chest of drawers. His decomposing body, which was the actual source of the smell reported by the anonymous tipster, had been partially eaten by rats and was covered by a suitcase, bundles of newspapers and three metal bread boxes. His death was attributed to asphyxiation.

House contents

Police and workmen removed approximately 120 tons of valuables, junk and other items from the Collyer brownstone. Near the spot where Homer had died, police also found 34 bank account passbooks, with a total of $3,007 (about $ as of ).

Some of the more unusual items found in the home were exhibited at Hubert's Dime Museum, where they were featured alongside Human Marvels and sideshow performers. The centerpiece of this display was the chair in which Homer Collyer had died. The Collyer chair passed into the hands of private collectors upon being removed from public exhibit in 1956.

The house, having long gone without maintenance, was decaying: the roof leaked, and some walls had caved in, showering bricks and mortar on the rooms below. The house was deemed "unsafe and [a] fire hazard" in July 1947 and was razed later that month. the cumulative estate of the Collyer brothers was valued at $91,000 (equivalent to $ in ), of which $20,000 worth was personal property (jewelry, cash, securities, and the like). Fifty-six people, mostly first and second cousins, made claims for the estate. A Pittsburgh woman named Ella Davis claimed to be the long lost sister of the Collyers. Davis' claim was dismissed after she failed to provide a birth certificate to prove her identity (years earlier, Davis had claimed she was the widow of Peter Liebach, another wealthy recluse, from Pittsburgh, who was found murdered in 1937). In October 1952, the New York County court decided that twenty-three of the claimants were to split the estate equally.

My Brother's Keeper is a 1954 historical fiction novel based on the lives of the Collyer brothers, their hoard, their eccentricity, and their deaths.
In the 1955–1956 "Classic 39" season of The Honeymooners ("The Worry Wart"), affable neighbor Ed Norton, chiding Ralph Kramden for his thriftiness, quips "Congratulations on that 93 cent gas bill, Ralph ... You broke the all-time low gas bill record, set by the Collyer brothers in 1931!"
The 1995 movie Unstrung Heroes features two uncles whose lifestyle and apartment are a direct homage to the Collyer brothers. The film was based on a 1991 memoir by Franz Lidz, who, in 2003, published Ghosty Men: The Strange but True Story of the Collyer Brothers, New York's Greatest Hoarders. Ghosty Men also chronicles the parallel life of Arthur Lidz, the hermit uncle of Unstrung Heroes, who grew up near the Collyer mansion and was inspired by the brothers. Taking considerable historical liberties, the novel extends their lifespans into the late 1970s and switches the brothers' birth order.
Matt Bell's short story "The Collectors" focuses on the months leading up to the Collyers' deaths, as well as exploring Langley's memories of their past and the effects on the people who discover their bodies. It was first published in 2009 as a chapbook, then included in Bell's debut collection How They Were Found in 2010.
The brothers are also the inspiration behind Richard Greenberg's play The Dazzle, which played in London in the winter of 2015–16. Andrew Scott and David Dawson played Langley and Homer respectively in the production by Emily Dobbs, which was staged at the former site of the Central Saint Martins School of Art on Charing Cross Road.
A 1973 episode of the television show The Streets of San Francisco titled "The House on Hyde Street" was inspired by the Collyers.
"Alta Kockers", episode 10 of season 20 of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, makes reference to the Collyer brothers in the characters Joseph and Benjamin Edelman, who live in a hoard-filled, boobytrapped mansion and have not left the house in decades.

Footnotes

<!-- ==References==

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" -->

External links

Collyer brothers photo gallery, New York Daily News, October 19, 2012
Article on the Collyer brothers on the Obsessive Compulsive Foundation website