Collyer brothers
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.
The brothers were also uncomfortable with the shift in racial demographics, as more African Americans moved into the once-empty apartment houses that were built near a projected subway route.
In an attempt to exclude burglars, Langley constructed booby traps and tunnels among the collection of items and trash that filled the house.
[17] Langley spent the majority of his time tinkering with various inventions, such as a device to vacuum the inside of pianos and a Model T Ford adapted to generate electricity.
Langley later told a reporter that he fed and bathed his brother, read him classic literature, as he could no longer see, and played piano sonatas for him.
[13] Langley concocted a diet for his brother consisting of one hundred oranges a week, black bread, and peanut butter, claiming that this regimen was curing Homer's blindness.
[20][21] 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.
[13] His appearance was disheveled; he sported a droopy mustache, wore a 1910 boating cap and his tattered clothes were held together by pins.
[26] While rumors and legends abounded in Harlem about the brothers,[27] 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.
[27] The incident, publicized in the local press, reportedly drew a crowd of a thousand curious onlookers and was one of the few times Homer was seen outside their apartment.
[12] The brothers drew media attention again in August 1942 when the Bowery Savings Bank threatened to evict the Collyers for failing to pay their mortgage for three years.
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.
[32] 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.
[17] On March 21, 1947, an anonymous tipster who identified himself only as "Charles Smith" phoned the 22nd Police Precinct and insisted there was a dead body in the house.
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.
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 five hours of digging, Homer Collyer's body was found in an alcove surrounded by filled boxes and newspapers that were piled to the ceiling.
[19] Homer was wearing a tattered blue-and-white bathrobe, his matted, grey hair reached his shoulders, and his head was resting on his knees.
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.
[39] 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[21][40][41] and was covered by a suitcase, bundles of newspapers and three metal bread boxes.
[35] Police theorized that Langley was crawling through the tunnel to take food to his paralyzed brother when he inadvertently tripped a booby trap he had created and got crushed by debris.
[39] Items were removed from the house such as baby carriages, a doll carriage, 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 body forms, painted portraits, photos of pin-up girls from the early 1900s, plaster busts, Mrs. Collyer's hope chests, rusty bed springs, the kerosene stove, a child's chair (the brothers were lifelong bachelors and childless), more than 25,000 books (including thousands about medicine and engineering and more than 2,500 on law), human organs pickled in jars,[21] eight live cats, the chassis of the old Model T with which Langley had been tinkering, tapestries, hundreds of yards of unused silks and other fabrics, clocks, fourteen pianos (both grand and upright),[39] a clavichord, two organs, banjos, violins, bugles, accordions, a gramophone and records, and countless bundles of newspapers and magazines, some of them decades old, and thousands of bottles and tin cans and a great deal of garbage.
[31][45] 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 salvageable items fetched about $2,000 at auction;[47] the cumulative estate of the Collyer brothers was valued at $91,000 (equivalent to $1,421,836 in 2023[31]), of which $20,000 worth was personal property (jewelry, cash, securities, and the like).
