April 29, 2009
The Collyer Brothers
The incredible story of the Collyer brothers who barricaded themselves in their Harlem brownstone and hoarded a 100 tons of this and that while outside the neighborhood around them transformed.
After their gas, telephone, electricity and water were turned off in 1939 because of their failure to pay the bills, the brothers took to warming the large house using only a small kerosene heater. For a while, Langley attempted to generate his own energy by means of a car engine. Langley began to wander outside at night; he fetched their water from a post in a park four blocks to the south. Langley would also walk miles all over the City to get food, sometimes going as far as Williamsburg, Brooklyn to buy as little as a loaf of bread. He would also pick food out of the garbage and collect food that was going to be thrown out by grocers and butchers to bring back to his crippled brother. He also dragged home countless pieces of abandoned junk that aroused his interest. In 1933, Homer, already crippled by rheumatism, went blind from hemorrhages in the back of both of his eyes. Langley devised a remedy, a diet of one hundred oranges a week, along with black bread and peanut butter.
In 1942, the New York Herald Tribune interviewed Langley. In response to a query about the bundles of newspapers, Langley replied, “I am saving newspapers for Homer, so that when he regains his sight he can catch up on the news.”
(thanks, Chris)
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“Today, the Collyer Death Chair is maintained in the holdings of a collector of oddities named Babette Bombshell of Orlando, Florida.”
“There is also a Swedish play called Samlarna (The Hoarders), by Lotta Lotass, which has been translated to English by the author herself.”
I wage a continual battle against my own mild form of ‘Collyer brothers syndrome’. If I’d not moved some fifteen times over the past thirty years, it could be really really scary.
[...] moved some fifteen times over the past thirty years,” said Sheila, “my own mild form of ‘Collyer brothers syndrome’ might have rendered me [...]
Sheila, do you think any of your past acquisitions now reside in the collection of Babette Bombshell of Orlando, Florida?
or were incorporated into the plays of Lotta Lotass?
It’s probably Babette Bombshell of Orlando, Florida who bought the contents of my storage shed at auction back in 1998! She’s got a shitload of great stuff if that’s so!
I think of the Collyer Brothers often; hoarding runs in my family, on both sides.
There, but for the fact that I dislike paper newspapers, go I.
Deron, for all you know, i am Lotta Lotass.
one can hope.
Believe me, I do.