A CANOE IN THE ATTIC Clean your room, or youll end up like the Collyer brothers! Readers of a certain age likely heard that statement a few times as children. Although largely forgotten today, the Collyer brothers exerted a peculiar hold over the American psyche for decades after their deaths in 1947. Homer Collyer (born in 1881) and Langley Collyer (born in 1885) were the sons of Herman Livingston Collyer, a Manhattan gynecologist, and his first cousin, Susie Gage Frost. Hmmm.... Im already sensing a potential for oddness. The Collyer family moved into the brownstone at the corner of 128th and 5th avenue in Harlem in 1909, when Harlem was attracting wealthy residents. Something of an eccentric, Dr. Collyer frequently paddled a canoe down the East River to and from the hospital on Blackwells Island (modern-day Roosevelts Island). He abandoned his family around 1919, moving into a house on 77th street. Apparently Mrs. Collyer split her time between the two houses. Homer and Langley stayed in the 5th Ave house. Dr. Collyer died in 1923, and Mrs. Collyer in 1929. Preferring their own company for the next 18 years, and willfully blind to the changes in the world around them, the brothers lived in a self-contained world of books, family heirlooms, Langleys experiments....and whatever else Langley dragged home. Both men claimed to have attended Columbia University (though Columbia has no record of Langley ever having attended). Homer earned a degree in Admiralty Law, and Langley supposedly studied engineering and the piano. While still a young man, Langley began to wear his hair unfashionably long, claiming he was a musician. In his spare time, he tinkered with household objects in hopes of becoming an inventor. Among Langleys inventions were a device for vacuuming the insides of pianos and his fathers Model T Ford, adapted to generate electricity. (An electric Model T? Eat your hearts out, Tesla fanatics!) Langley Collyer had seemingly rational explanations for their lifestyle and habits, which were frankly delusional. Living amongst his fathers medical books, Langley believed he had acquired medical knowledge by osmosis. When Homer went blind as a result of a stroke in 1933, Langley treated his blindness with a prescription of 100 oranges per week, supplemented with peanut butter and black bread. For years, neighborhood rumors of their eccentricities circulated, fueling rumors that the two lived an extravagant lifestyle behind closed doors, surrounded by piles of cash and imported luxuries. In reality, the brothers were sliding into madness. They had their phone disconnected in 1917, after claiming they were being overcharged. They quit paying their gas bill. When the gas company turned off their service in 1928, they lived without heat or hot water, and used kerosene for cooking and lighting. Langley explained that not having a phone or electricity simplified their lives. He maintained that he could generate electricity using the modified Model T, but preferred kerosene. When rock-wielding vandals used their windows as targets, Langley simply boarded up the broken windows. Langley began to wander the city at night, fetching water for household uses at a nearby park. He was perfectly happy traveling miles for groceries, sometimes as far as Brooklyn just for a loaf of bread. He went dumpster diving behind grocers and butchers shops for free food to bring home to his brother. It was during these wanderings that Langley also began to drag home random junk, newspapers, furniture, and anything else which aroused his interest. For years a neighborhood fixture, the Collyer brothers avoided the wider spotlight until 1938, when newspaper reporter Helen Worden began to write stories about the brothers, referring to Langley as “the mystery man of Harlem,” and perpetuating the rumors that the brothers lived on piles of hoarded money that Langley refused to put into a bank. Worden cornered Langley one night during one of his walks and asked about rumors of a rowboat in the attic and a Model T in the basement. The boat, he explained, was his father’s canoe. The auto was his, too. A neighbor described Langley as “the ghosty man to another reporter. The fact that Homer hadnt been seen in years, and that Langley dressed as if it were still 1910 didnt help matters. In 1942, the New York Herald Tribune interviewed Langley. In response to a query about the increasing number of bundles of newspapers he kept in the house, he replied, “I am saving newspapers for Homer, so that when he regains his sight he can catch up on the news.” Langley blamed the reporters for the publics morbid curiosity in their lives, which made his collecting difficult. As public interest in the brothers mysterious lifestyle began to grow, Langley became increasingly paranoid about thieves. He began to arrange his ever-growing collection of junk into a complex and elaborate series of mazes, tunnels, and booby traps. No one had any idea what the interior of the house was like until 1942. That year, the Bowery Savings Bank attempted to evict the brothers when they quit making their mortgage payments. The bank sent someone to serve an eviction notice, but the argument got so loud that neighbors called the police, who in turn tried to break down the house’s front door. They were unable to do so due to a solid wall of junk wedged against the inside of the door. The standoff ended when Langley wrote out a check for $6,700 to pay off the mortgage. On March 21, 1947, the NYPD received an anonymous call that there was a dead body in the Collyer house. Again, they tried to force open the front door, finally resorting to simply taking the door off its hinges. Behind the door, they found stacks of boxes completely blocking the entrance hall. The basement entrance was also blocked. Entering through a relatively clear first-floor window, they were confronted with an unbelievable conglomeration of junk of every description. Later that day, NYPD officers forced open a second-floor window, where they found Homer Collyer, slumped in a wingback chair, dead. Barely clothed, his hair wildly overgrown, Homer had died from lack of food and water. For an unknown length of time he had suffered from gangrenous bedsores, bronchitis and emphysema. Langley was nowhere to be found. By March 31st, ten days after finding Homer, wild rumors were circulating regarding what had become of Langley. There were various tales that he had murdered Homer, that he had been spotted catching a train out of town, and that he was still hiding in the house and had been seen in an upstairs window. The odors the searchers encountered within the house were described as a “a punch from a mailed fist.” Cleaning crews and police officers smoked cheap cigars in a vain attempt to cover the stench. Ripping out doors and windows and digging through stacks of garbage, crews removed Homer’s 2,500-volume law library, Dr. Collyers medical library, family oil portraits, Mrs. Collyers hope chests, toy trains, 14 pianos, chandeliers, tapestries, clocks, 13 Oriental rugs, 5 violins, 2 organs, multiple guns, bowling balls, pickled human organs in jars, a fake two-headed baby, and 8 live cats. There were also several skeletons of either cats, or rats big enough to be cats. On April 8th, almost 3 weeks and 100 tons of junk after they started, the searchers finally found Langley. While climbing through one of his tunnels, it appears he had accidentally triggered one of his own booby traps. He had been crushed under a massive pile of paper and boxes, only a few feet from where Homer had been found. Dependent upon Langley for food and water, it is unlikely that Homer survived for very many days alone. In the end, over 130 tons of material was removed from the house. There was so little of real value that the few items worth auctioning fetched only $1,800. Both brothers were buried with their parents at Cypress Hills Cemetery in Brooklyn. To this day, the New York Police and Fire Depts refer to a dangerously hoarded and cluttered building as a “Collyers Mansion.” It is the one phrase that strikes fear into even seasoned emergency responders. The site of the original Collyers Mansion on 5th Ave is now a tiny, and tidy, park. The Freelance Historian 2014.07.12
Posted on: Sat, 12 Jul 2014 11:09:51 +0000
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