Hoarding & the Lifehack: The Collyer Brothers Story

The Collyer Brothers were eccentric hermits who lived and died in their family’s brownstone townhouse on Fifth Avenue in New York City. The brownstone was located at 2078 Fifth Avenue at the corner of 128th Street in Harlem. When they were born there in the 1880s, Harlem was a genteel neighborhood. By the time of their deaths in 1947, it’s upper crust had begun to crumble.

The first time I heard the Collyer Brothers story, it’s telling focused on the sensational details of their demise. I figured they were bums. Maybe, maybe not. Their family traced its origin to the Mayflower. Father was a doctor, Mother a socialite. The brothers had Ivy League educations. Homer Collyer trained as an engineer but aspired to be a concert pianist. He affected long, flowing hair in the Franz Liszt tradition. His younger brother Langley trained as an admiralty lawyer but aspired to be an inventor. He tinkered with junk salvaged in the streets. I use the words “trained” and “aspired” because it’s not clear from the historical record whether either of them ever had a job.

After graduating from nearby Columbia University, the brothers continued to live at home with Mother. When they inherited the brownstone after her death, they kept the family heirlooms plus all the office furniture, books, and anatomical specimens from Father’s medical practice. And they accumulated plenty of stuff on their own initiative. Homer acquired seventeen grand pianos. Langley brought home the engine from a Ford Model T to power a homemade electrical generator.

At this point, you might say the Collyer Brothers were a bit odd, but not necessarily pathological. Father’s stuff, Mother’s stuff, the kids stuff, adult kids who won’t move out. Many of us can relate to that on one level or another. Acquisitiveness, after all, is as American as apple pie. In the Collyers’ day, Thorstein Veblen called it conspicuous consumption. That’s what the Leisure Class was supposed to do. In our day, we call it consumer confidence, and it’s everyone’s duty. Jobs and economic growth depend on it.

Something happened in the 1920s. As Harlem experienced its Renaissance, the Collyer Brothers became more and more reclusive and alienated from their neighbors. Rumors circulated. The brothers were penny-pinching tightwads who wouldn’t spend a dime to fix up the property. They were really rich misers guarding a hoard of jewels and gold. Neighborhood kids threw rocks at the windows. Langley boarded up the windows. Burglars tried to break in to get the gold. Langley built elaborate barricades and booby-traps to stop them. The Collyer Brothers became notorious throughout New York. The first newspaper account of them spread the story that, behind the crumbling façade of their dilapidated mansion, they lived in “orientalist splendor.”

Something else happened. In 1933, Homer Collyer went blind. Rheumatism had already limited his mobility. Langley tried to cure him with a special diet of black bread, peanut butter, and a hundred oranges a day. He also began to hoard books, magazines and newspapers. Bundles of them. Stack upon stack. In 1942 Langley explained to the New York Herald Tribune that he was "saving newspapers for Homer, so that when he regains his sight he can catch up on the news."

Five years later, on March 21, 1947, a neighbor called the police. It smelled like somebody died next door. The NYPD knew all about Langley Collyer’s eccentricity and truculence. When they didn’t get an answer at 2078 Fifth Avenue, they battered down the front door. Then they were stopped by a wall of junk from floor to ceiling. They pulled out eighteen tons of debris and still did not excavate a path to the second floor. Meanwhile, a crowd of 600 gathered in the street to wait, watch, and speculate about what happened to the Collyer Brothers.

Later on the first day, a policeman broke through a second-story window and hacked through another wall of junk. He found Homer slumped in a rocking chair, wearing a tattered bath robe, emaciated, dead from starvation. The coroner determined that Homer had been dead no more than ten hours. Langley could not be found.

The Collyer Brothers story became front page news in New York. Langley sightings were reported from Morningside Heights to Atlantic City. Sanitation workers carried tons of junk out of the townhouse day after day but couldn’t locate the source of the stench. Finally, on April 8, a worker discovered Langley’s partially decomposed body buried beneath a suitcase and several large bundles of newspapers. The corpse lay just ten feet from Homer’s rocking chair. Langley had been crawling through a tunnel of newspaper bundles when one of his own booby traps crushed him. He was bringing Homer a tray of food, probably peanut butter and oranges.

Hoarding & the Lifehack: Langley Collyer

Langley Collyer (1885-1947) was a notorious recluse who lived with his brother Homer in a dilapidated townhouse in New York City. When Homer went blind in 1933, Langley began to hoard magazines and newspapers for the day his brother could see again. Langley knew Homer would want to “catch up on the news.”

Langley was crushed in an avalanche of newspaper bundles while bringing his brother a tray of food. His partially decomposed body was found just ten feet away from the rocking chair where Homer eventually starved to death.

Hoarding & the Lifehack: The Collyer Mansion

More than 100 tons of debris were removed from 2078 Fifth Avenue after the Collyer Brothers died there in 1947. The Collyers’ hoard of junk included 25,000 books and countless bundles of magazines and newspapers.

The inventory enumerated on the Collyer Brothers Wikipedia page reads like a Sears Roebuck catalog or Whitmanesque list of found objects: “rope, baby carriages, a doll carriage, rakes, umbrellas, rusted bicycles, old food, potato peelers, a collection of guns, gas 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.”

Collyer Mansion became a term used by firefighters to designate junk-filled buildings that should be condemned as fire hazards. Collyer Brothers Syndrome, or disposophobia, names a fear of throwing anything away. It is also called compulsive hoarding, which is related to obsessive compulsive disorder.

Hoarding & the Lifehack: A Metaphor for the Attention Economy

Let this photograph of the interior of the Collyer Brothers townhouse stand as a metaphor for the attention economy. What is scarce here? Not information, but the attention to do something with it. Many of us feel overwhelmed by the avalanche of information that pours through our lives everyday. Does your email inbox ever seem like this?