Wednesday, January 12, 2022 – Two men whose sad lives left a legend of hoarding
WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 12, 2022
The 570th Edition
Collyer Brothers Park
Manhattan
Harlem park dedicated to
compulsive hoarders killed by
their own junk.
(and their family connection to Blackwell’s Island)
from Atlas Obscura
Apart from a few isolated incidents, they were rarely seen or heard until March 21, 1947, when the police were tipped off about a possible dead body in the house. They broke down the door and were confronted with piles of junk so large that it took them two hours to find Homer’s corpse dressed in an old bathrobe with his filthy gray hair reaching down to his shoulders. On March 30, false rumors circulated that Langley had boarded a bus for Atlantic City, but on April 8, nearly three weeks after the alarm was first raised, his decomposing body was found just ten feet from where his brother had perished. He had been crawling through a tunnel of newspapers when he had activated one of his own booby traps, which crushed him. His paralyzed brother starved to death several days later.
In total, 130 tons of junk was removed from the house, including baby carriages, rusted bicycles, a collection of guns, glass chandeliers, bowling balls, camera equipment, three dressmaking dummies, painted portraits, plaster busts, rusty bed springs, 25,000 books, eight live cats, hundreds of yards of unused silks and fabric, clocks, 14 pianos, and a selection of pickled human organs in jars.
The brothers were buried in Brooklyn and the same year, the house was torn down. By the 1960s, it was being used as a park, leaving future generations to dwell on the brothers’ strange and tragic lives.
Homer Lusk Collyer (November 6, 1881 – March 21, 1947) and Langley Wakeman Collyer (October 3, 1885 – c. March 9, 1947), known as the Collyer brothers.
DR. HERMAN LIVINGSTON COLLYER
Dr. Collyer attended to patients on Blackwell’s Island. It is said that he rowed his canoe to the island daily.
A directory of the physicians who served at City Hospital.
WEDNESDAY PHOTO OF THE DAY
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TUESDAY PHOTO OF THE DAY
Laura Hussey got it!!
Rising nearly 70 feet, the shed houses 5,000 tons of salt and marks the historic location where the former canal enclosing Lower Manhattan met the Hudson River. The Salt Shed’s solid, crystalline form acts as a counterpoint to the diaphanous, scrim-like façade of the Manhattan 1/2/5 Garage, directly across Spring Street to the north.
ATLAS OBCURA
R.I.H.S. ARCHIVES
DATTNER ARCHITECTS
NYC DEPT. OF SANITATION
RIHS (C) FUNDING PROVIDED BY ROOSEVELT ISLAND OPERATING CORPORATION PUBLIC PURPOSE GRANTS CITY COUNCIL REPRESENTATIVE BEN KALLOS DISCRETIONARY FUNDING THRU DYCD
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