Manhattan's First Hoarders: The Tragic Story of the Collyer Brothers and their Mansion

 

On March 21, 1947 an anonymous tipster, giving the simple alias of Charles Smith, called the 122nd precinct of the New York City Police Department.

The tipster insists that there is a dead body locked inside and decomposing in a four story brownstone located at 2078 Fifth Avenue on the corner of 128th Street.  He says that there is a terrible smell emanating from the building.  Other than mentioning the odor the caller refuses to provide any further information and promptly hangs up.

Despite the gravely serious assertions made by the anonymous tipster the police, at first, are not overly concerned about the matter.  They know that the brownstone mansion located at 2078 Fifth Avenue is the home of the reclusive and eccentric Collyer brothers.  It is routine for neighbors to call and complain about repulsive odors or strange sounds coming from the four story home in the middle of the night and it is just as common for teenage pranksters to call 911 asserting bizarre claims about the Collyer brothers supposed criminal activity.  All of the claims eventually prove false.

So, that afternoon, only one lone patrolman was initially dispatched to 2078 Fifth Avenue to investigate the call.

When that single officer arrives to investigate he finds no one answering his repeated knocking and discovers that it is impossible for him to enter the residence.  The Collyer brothers have no working doorbell or telephone and every window and door seems to be sealed shut.

The windows are boarded up and covered by gratings of iron bars.  Finding that it is completely hopeless to attempt to enter the building alone, the officer calls for backup, and additional squad cars as well as a seven member rescue squad from the New York City Fire Department arrive on the scene.

The firefighters break the iron grille-work that is covering the first and second story windows and start to pull apart the boards.  To their surprise once they force open the windows they find that all of the openings to the mansion are blocked from floor to ceiling with piles and piles of junk.

Slowly, piece by piece, the first responders remove old books, newspapers, cardboard boxes, scrap metal, old car parts, musical instruments, broken furniture--all manner of garbage and detritus--in a vain attempt to enter the residence.

Soon, an enormous mountain of trash and debris builds up on the Fifth Avenue sidewalk.  Hundreds of onlookers gather to watch what’s going on and dozens more police officers and firefighters are dispatched to try and control the scene at the Collyer Brothers mansion.

 Firefighters are able to chop down the front door, but once they do so they are greeted by a nearly impenetrable wall of old newspaper and cardboard stacked up to the high ceiling in the foyer.

After over five hours of struggling a patrolman is finally able to gain access to the building through a second story window.  Once inside he is able to slither his way through stacks of old boxes and piles of broken furniture.  The stench in the second floor junk filled room is almost unbearable and the police officer has to repeatedly hold his breath just to keep from vomiting.  

In that room among stacks of mouldy cardboard boxes, crates tied together with rope, towers of yellowing newspaper and dozens of broken musical instruments, crumpled in a two foot wide alcove, the New York City Police Department discovers the decomposing body of Homer Collyer.

Police Officers inside Collyer Brothers Mansion

Homer is dressed only in a tattered old bathrobe with matted gray hair flowing down past his shoulders.  When police find his body it is in the kneeling position and propped up against a wall of the garbage that litters the home from floor to ceiling.

The medical examiner will later confirm that Homer Collyer had been dead for anywhere between ten and twelve hours when police found his body.  The cause of his death will be listed as starvation.

Having been well acquainted in the past with calls regarding the Collyer’s mansion the police at first believe that the anonymous caller named Smith must have been Homer’s younger brother Langley, but there’s only one problem.  Even after an entire day and night of searching the home there is still no sign of Langley Collyer.   

On April 8, 1947, after removing over 140 tons of accumulated trash collected by the Collyer brothers over three decades from the mansion, sanitation workers discovered the rotting corpse of Langley Collyer hidden away in a small tunnel hollowed out from the mountains of garbage only ten feet away from where the body of his brother Homer had originally been discovered.  His body, by the time it was found, had been half eaten away by rats.

The medical examiner determined that Langley had most probably died sometime around March 9th about two weeks prior to the police discovery of his dead brother Homer’s body.  Langley’s cause of death was listed as asphyxiation.  Police investigators theorized that Langley had most probably died after he was crushed to death while crawling through one of the tunnels of garbage to bring food to his brother Homer who was both blind and paralyzed due to the effects of rheumatism.  Without his brother to feed and take care of him Homer most probably succumbed to the effects of starvation and dehydration about a week later.

Homer Collyer was born on November 6, 1881 and his younger brother Langley was born almost four years later on October 3, 1885.

The Collyer brothers lived almost their entire lives in a four story brownstone mansion located at 2078 Fifth Avenue in the Harlem section of Manhattan that had been purchased by their father, Dr. Herman Livingston Collyer, in the year 1909.

For nearly three decades the Collyer brothers obsessively hoarded books, furniture, musical instruments, newspapers, bicycles, car parts and almost any discarded junk that they could lay their hands on.  Homer and Langley Collyer even booby trapped their own residence to protect their hoard and to keep prying eyes and unwanted visitors out.

Homer and Langley’s father Herman Collyer was a gynecologist who worked at Bellevue Hospital.  He, like his sons, was known for his eccentricities.  It was reported that Herman liked to take a canoe to work down the East River and then walk across Manhattan carrying the canoe.

Herman married his first cousin, Susie Gage Frost Collyer, in 1880.  Susie Collyer was a direct descendant of Robert Livingston, one of New York City’s most influential colonial officials, and Homer and Langley would later claim to be able to trace their lineage all the way back to the pilgrims settlement at Plymouth.

Growing up Homer and Langley Collyer were both described as intelligent and sociable.  Each would attend Columbia University with Homer obtaining a law degree while Langley would study both engineering and chemistry.  In addition to being a scientist, Langley Collyer was also an accomplished concert pianist who would perform at Carnegie Hall and work professionally as a musician for a time.

Life began to go seriously awry for the Collyer brothers though in the year 1919 when their parent’s Susie and Herman separated.  Their father would move out leaving the brownstone to his now ex-wife.  Both Homer and Langley, by then aged 38 and 34 respectively, had never married or lived anywhere else, and each chose to stay with their mother in the brownstone mansion at 2078 Fifth Avenue.

It has been reported that both of the Collyer brothers were extremely close to their mother, with some even speculating that incest may have been involved, and it was not uncommon in the 1920’s for affluent Manhattanites to see the Collyer brother out and about with their mom, dressed in outdated 19th century fashion.

Then in 1929 their mother died and the stock market crashed plunging the nation into the depths of the Great Depression.  Those few individuals who spoke with Langley Collyer in the 1930’s and 40’s said that in his mind the death of his mother and the stock market crash of 1929 were two inseparable events that each hinted at impending doom and calamity.

For four years after the death of their mom, though, the Collyer brothers continued to socialize and to go out occasionally.  Homer continued to practice law while Langley worked as a dealer in a piano gallery.

But any semblance of normality in the already eccentric life of the Collyer brothers completely went out the window in 1933 when Homer went blind due to hemorrhaging behind his eyes and Langley quit his job to take care of his now sightless brother.  Homer and Langley were able to support themselves because of a lucrative inheritance they received upon the death of their father in addition to ownership of the brownstone mansion that had been passed onto them when their mother died in 1929.

Langley Collyer once told a snooping reporter that he, “dressed, fed and played piano sonatas to entertain his blind brother.”  He also insisted that one day his brother would surely recover from his blindness because of a special diet of oranges, bread, oatmeal and tea that he consistently fed him.

Langley Collyer and one of the 'nests'

As the brothers became more and more reclusive rumors began to swirl around the city about what was hidden inside their Harlem mansion.  According to one of the most persistent rumours the Collyer brothers had millions of dollars in cash, stored in cardboard boxes and paper bags, hidden throughout their home.

During the Great Depression crowds would routinely gather outside their home to catch a glimpse inside and attempted break-ins became common.  In response to the snooping and the vandalism, Langley had all of the windows boarded up and even booby-trapped the ever growing piles of junk the brothers accumulated to protect both himself and Homer from prying outsiders.

Only Langley would leave the house occasionally, in the middle of the night, and walk for miles around the city journeying on foot to Brooklyn and Queens so as not to be recognized in order to acquire food, discarded musical instruments, old newspapers, books and any unwanted items that he supposed he might have a use for.

Lacking any medical treatment, and never leaving the inside of the brownstone, overtime Homer’s health began to deteriorate and he developed rheumatism that paralyzed him from the waist down.  The brothers took to living in “nests”, which were in reality small spaces that Langley hollowed out from all the junk that he accumulated.

Their telephone was disconnected in 1937 and in 1938 both their electricity and water were shut off due to unpaid bills.  At this time the brothers took to lighting kerosene lamps to see in the dark, while Langley began to fetch water at night from a pump located in a nearby park.

In that same year, 1938, a real estate agent approached the brothers by knocking on their door with an offer to buy their property for the then princely sum of $125,000.  They promptly refused and Langley angrily ran the real estate agent off the property.  After this incident The New York Times ran an article on the eccentric Collyer brothers in which their hoarding was first reported on.

After reading the article in the Times a reporter for The New York World Telegram, Helen Worden, was able to approach Langley Collyer and gain an interview.  Most likely, Langley had read what had been written about them in the Times, and wanted to set the record straight.

In the interview Langley recounted his performances at Carnegie Hall and his time as a professional concert pianist.  He said that he had never received the attention he deserved and quit playing professionally because, “what was the point of going on?”

Langley also asserted that there was no point in going outside because, “they would probably only rob him.”  He said that he considered it his job to take care of his brother Homer so that he could recover from his blindness, as he was certain that he eventually would, and that he wished, “everyone would just leave them alone”.

Four years later, in 1942, the Collyer Brothers would once again come to public attention.  This time, a cleanup crew was sent to the brothers home after the Bowery Savings Bank had begun formal eviction proceedings against Homer and Langley for an outstanding mortgage payment.

The cleaning crew reported that once they finally gained access to the home they were greeted by a sheer wall of old newspapers.  Langley started to yell obscenities at the crewman and shouted for them to leave from one of his nests in the garbage.  After being threatened with the police and subsequent arrest, Langley crawled out from his nest, and wrote the savings bank a personal check in the amount of $6700 (the equivalent of $125,000 in today’s money) to make them go away.

When one of the cleaners asked Langley why he had accumulated so many old newspapers he is reported to have said that he, “wanted Homer to be able to catch up on the news once he regained his sight”.

Rooftop view of the Collyer's mansion

Those few individuals who were able to speak with Langley Collyer in the decade and a half prior to his death all reported that he seemed to be a kind, soft-spoken man who was afraid of the modern world outside his door and felt it his duty to protect and heal his ailing brother.

Today, there is a small park, called Collyer Brothers Park located on the site of the old brownstone at 2078 Fifth Avenue.  Though the story of Homer and Langley Collyer is definitely a sad and tragic one, it is  a story that has helped modern psychiatrists better understand the nature of hoarding, obsessive compulsive disorder and social isolation in terms of mental illness and develop more beneficial treatments to help others accordingly.

To this very day, firefighters and police officers, particularly in the New York City area still sometimes refer to any building or place of residence that is so filled with trash or debris that entry poses a serious danger to first responders as a ‘Collyer’s Mansion’ or simply a ‘Collyer’s’.

Ironically, it seems as if Homer and Langley Collyer who tried so desperately to hide forever from the outside world, are destined to have their name live on indefinitely in our collective historical memory.

 

Collyer Brothers Park