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Moment of Luxury can be seen on your local PBS station. |
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| There’s a thin line between passion and obsession. This true urban legend about the “eccentric” Collyer brothers, who took their penchant for collecting to frightening extremes, will illustrate this point. |
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By: Stacey Asip |
WRITER |
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In light of Bill’s Playbill collection, we at Moment of Luxury began to wonder what else people collect. This in turn led to more questions of why people choose to collect what they collect. We became more and more fascinated by the varying degrees of collecting. We found that while one person’s collection of say, Teddy Bears or matchbooks, often fit safely and tastefully on the family room shelf, another person’s compilation took up every available square foot of space. This in turn reminded us of our favorite, true, urban legend, that of the Collyer Brothers. Meet Homer and Langley Collyer, two Ivy-League educated sons of a New York City doctor who were essentially killed by their collecting…
The brothers were part of a prominent New York family whose ancestors had come over on the Speedwell, the one-time sister ship of the Mayflower. Their father, Dr. Herman L. Collyer was a wealthy, prominent gynecologist. Their mother, Susie Gage Frost was an opera singer. First son, Homer, was born in 1881. Langley followed in 1885. The family lived in a three-story mansion on 128th St. and Fifth Avenue, in then well-to-do Harlem. Both men earned degrees at near by Columbia University; Homer in engineering and Langley in law.
Herman abandoned the family in 1909, when his sons were in their 20s. He moved permanently out of the Fifth Avenue house, and his sons moved permanently back in. By 1929, both parents were dead. The brothers inherited everything and became recluses. In the 1930s and ‘40s, rumors swirled around the Harlem abode. It was said they were the richest men in the city… One, or the other of them, was a “ghostly man” who only went out at night to pick through garbage… They were living in “Orientalist Splendor,” sitting on piles of cash. This last rumor attracted burglars, which Langley warded off with homemade booby traps.
On March 21, 1947, an anonymous call (claiming there was a corpse in the house) brought cops from the 122nd Precinct to the Collyer place. There was no way to get in – no doorbell, no phone, no electricity and the doors were locked. An emergency squad broke the front door down. They were stopped cold in the foyer by a floor-to-ceiling wall of newspapers. Langley had been collecting them for decades. He was saving them for Homer, who had gone blind, so when his brother regained his sight, he would be able to catch up on the news.
Forced to break in through a second story window, police found more newspaper heaps, piles of empty boxes, old rakes and umbrellas tied together. Two hours later, they found Homer, wearing a tattered blue and white bathrobe. He had died only ten hours earlier of malnutrition, dehydration and cardiac arrest. 12 days later, after removing some of the 180 tons of stuff the brothers’ had amassed, they found Langley. He was only ten feet away from Homer. Apparently, Langley had been crawling through a newspaper tunnel to deliver Homer some food, when he triggered one of his own booby traps. A wall of newspapers had fallen down and crushed him.
Folding beds, phone books, half a sewing machine, a doll carriage, the chassis of a Model T, human organs pickled in jars, eight living cats, rusted bicycles, rotting food, potato peelers, guns, glass chandeliers, bowling balls, camera equipment, the folding top of a horse-drawn carriage, a sawhorse, dressmaking dummies, painted portraits, pinup girl photos (go Collyer boys!) plaster busts, their mother’s hope chests, their father’s medical equipment, rusty bed springs, a kerosene stove, a checkerboard, a child's chair, more than 25,000 books, a beaded lampshade, one British and six American flags, tapestries, hundreds of yards of unused silks and fabric, clocks, 14 pianos (both grand and upright), a clavichord, two organs, some banjos, violins, bugles and accordions, a gramophone and record albums, are some of the other treasures found in the Collyers’ collection.
What’s in yours?
Write in and tell us. We suspect there’s a little bit of the Collyers in us all. And, we demand details. Just what extremes have you gone to amassing those cereal boxes from all over the world? Include storage solutions! We definitely want to hear about forfeiting retirement funds to pay for extra warehousing. We want how-tos on taking complete advantage of grandma and her carless garage. (For extra credit, explain how you elbowed everyone else out of the will, to become the sole, future inheritor of her Hummel figurines!) And (especially for our younger obsessives), we solicit free counsel on manipulating one’s passive, enabling parents who let you live at home, well into your forties, for the purpose of all-day buying and selling of comic books and monster magazines on Ebay. We promise not to judge… |
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