Facta #2

It seems a police noir, and indeed it would make a good one.
On March 21,1947, the New York City police were called
by neighbors of a building at the corner of Fifth Avenue and
128th Street, in Harlem, in Manhattan. They reported the
stench emanating from the address, more precisely from
the apartment where the brothers Homer Lusk Collyer,
who was then 68 years old, and Langley Wakeman Collyer,
62, lived. They were inmates figures, considered eccentric
by those who lived nearby, and rightfully so they ended up
arousing neighborhood curiosity.
When the police reached the spot and tried to forcibly enter
the apartment, since no other type of contact or approach was
possible, they learned that it would not be an easy endeavor.
The front door was barred by a wall of papers, catalogs and
general debris. The basement windows were broken, but
protected by railings. The solution was to break and enter
the window of a room on the second floor. The scene inside
the room was comparable to the downstairs: a multitude
of boxes, papers, various objects, the structure of a stroller,
several umbrellas tied in a bundle and every imaginable type
of material. The first officer to enter took two hours to crawl
through the rubble and get to the body of Homer, found
sitting in a chair, wearing a blue and white bathrobe.
The medical team found that he probably died from a
combination of malnutrition, dehydration and cardiac
complications, no more than ten hours before, which meant
that the stench exuded from the apartment could not be
his. Police and firefighters continued taking the debris out
of the site, hoping to find Langley also in the apartment.
About 600 onlookers followed the work from the street.
Two days later, more than 19 tons of garbage had been
removed, papers and junk the Collyer brothers compulsively
accumulated. And no sign of Langley.
Nine days later, when crews were still taking things from
the apartment - about 84 tons of debris had been already
accounted for by then - rumors abound that the youngest
of the Collyer brothers had been seen near Atlantic City.
A search for Langley which covered nine different states
began. But nothing. On May 8 of that year, he was finally
found inside the apartment, a few meters away from where
the corpse of Homer had been, buried under a pile of phone
books, books and other papers. His decomposing body had
been partially eaten by rats. The delay to reach him was
fundamentally due the difficulty of removing so much debris.
It was found that he had died before Homer, and it was his
stench, therefore, that exuded from that house. Langley crept
down a hallway from tons of objects to bring water and food
to his older brother, who had mobility problems caused by
rheumatism and because he had lost his sight in 1933 – he
lived thus practically an invalid. The youngest Collyer had
been a victim of a trap he had prepared himself. When
passing by it, he caused the collapse of the junk on him and
died, crushed. The traps – there were several in the apartment
- were made in order to prevent entry by outsiders.
There were taken, in whole, from the Collyer house,
approximately 140 tons of indistinct things they had
accumulated over the years: guns, 14 pianos, one X-ray
machine, the carcass of a Ford Model T, much paper,
including telephone books of old date, approximately
25,000 books and piles of paper, tables, chairs, boxes,
human organs preserved in jars, cradles, violins, accordions
and other musical instruments, glass bottles, bowling balls,
old bicycles, gramophones, records, beds, sofas, dressers,
clocks, paintings and many many more objects imaginable,
all in the way of compressed garbage, plus eight live cats.
The case of the Collyer brothers, little known in Brazil, is
referential in the United States to what is called compulsive
hoarding - the obsessive accumulation of anything, often
without any focus. The term "Collyer Mansion" became a
jargon among New York firefighters and is used even today.
For decades, Langley and Homer brought objects together
in their apartment without apparent purpose. They were
also gradually moving away from social life, turning their
home into a kind of impregnable fortress, complete with
traps. Because of non-payment, the Collyer phone service
was cut in 1917, water, electricity and gas in 1928, which
means that they have spent the last 19 years of their lives in
improvisation - a kerosene lamp to light, a gadget created
by Langley to generate some energy and the water from a
station nearby. Also their food was obtained thanks to the
mendicant strolls of the younger brother in the city.
Could there be any justification or moral of the story for
the case that records the behavior of the Collyers? No,
it's just a pathological degeneration of the so common act
of collecting that could happen to any person. The case
of the Collyer brothers reverberated far, by the way, and
many of the items that have been accumulated by them
- including the chair in which Homer was found dead
- were gathered in an exhibition at the Hubert's Dime
Museum in New York in the early 1950s, and followed on
public exhibition for a long time, in an eccentric kind of
metacollection of collections.
Besides the exhibition, the episode also generated other
cultural products such as books (it is the case of "My
Brother's Keeper" by Marcia Davenport, 1954, or "Ghosty
Men" by Franz Lidz, which came to light in 1991) and films
(the short "Collyer Brother Syndrome", by David Willing
and Jessica Birnbaum, launched in 2003 and that can be
seen on YouTube, and the feature "Unstrung Heroes",1995,
directed by Diane Keaton) - a testament to the vocation of
this bizarre episode to the universe of fiction.
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