Who were the Collyer brothers? (Be the first to answer and win a basement full of old newspapers)

Cleaning out the brownstone (Image via Wikipedia)

Ah, the Collyer brothers are back. You’ve got to love the Collyer brothers. Writers sure do. Every decade or so, another book or movie or play comes out based on the Collyer brothers and their tragic, creepy, spectacular, iconic, horrible and—let’s be brutal here–darkly funny demise.

This time it’s E.L. Doctorow. His novel, Homer and Langley, goes on sale in September. Michiko Kakutani is probably reading her review copy right now. I managed to snag one (not hers) having always been a big Collyer brothers fan. Also a Doctorow fan. I’m in the middle of it. I’m liking it.

Doctorow takes liberties, as novelists will. But then so did the Collyers. The fascination for a writer here is basically this: How do two brothers start out normal, in fact, far above the norm, and end up, as Jon Stewart might put it, batshit insane? It’s an irresistable exercise for the writerly imagination. What went wrong? How do people slip off the tracks into the existential void?

Things began so nicely. Homer and Langley Collyer were born in 1883 and 1886 into an upper-crust, old-line New York family with servants and a big house. The father was a gynecologist at Bellevue Hospital. Both sons went to Columbia University.

Exactly when it all started to go awry no one seems to know. The father, who had had eccentric tendencies (He sometimes commuted to work in a canoe, which he kept at home) abandoned the family at one point. After both parents were gone, the brothers, who never seemed to have much in the way of occupation, ended up living alone—except for each other–in the family brownstone at Fifth Avenue and 128th Street.

It had been a trendy, affluent, white neighborhood when the boys were young but Harlem had changed. The boys, too. They got old. And way beyond eccentric.

As time went by, there were some break-ins, some vandalism, bricks thrown through windows and such. And because the brothers were averse to paying bills and seeing strangers, there were sometimes tax collectors or utility-company representatives pounding futilely on the front door. The occupants were glimpsed less and less by the neighbors. They kept the shutters closed and barricaded themselves behind locks and bolts. Rumors abounded about the two old longhaired crackpots in the decrepit house, who would slip out for provisions only at night. They were misers, it was said, guarding priceless treasures.

Decades pass.

And one day in March, 1947, the cops show up. A mysterious call has reported a death in the house. The cops break in. Or try to. What greets them is astonishing.

A solid wall of…things.

The house was crammed full of junk. Junk of every description. Junk large and small. An ocean of junk, piled from floor to ceiling in every room. Fourteen pianos! A Model-T Ford! Army-surplus gas masks! Chandeliers. Bric-a-brac. Art work and stuff found on the streets. Plus innumerable bound and bundled newspapers, towering walls of them, packed tight, piled so that one could move through the rooms only by crawling in dark, narrow, crooked tunnels built out of those impacted newsprint blocks.

For weeks, workmen hauled out the detritus. An estimated 100 tons of it. The press had a field day. Crowds gathered. The city was agog.

They found Homer, the older one, first. He was sitting in an armchair, where he had starved to death. Homer had become blind and immobile, dependent on his brother for sustenance.

Langley was discovered several days later. In their fear of invasion, the Collyers had booby-trapped their refuge. Take a wrong turn in the maze or touch the wrong item, and a ton of dreck falls on you. Which is what happened to Langley. His body was pinned under a suitcase, three breadboxes and several newspaper bundles. It had been partly eaten by rats. He was found only a few feet away from Homer, who had been waiting helplessly for his brother to come, perhaps suspecting that he never would again.

And so Homer and Langley Collyer passed into trivia history. They became another bit of louche New York esoterica, like Stanford White and Evelyn Nesbit or Judge Crater or Kitty Genovese or Darius McCollum, the guy who went joyriding in stolen subway cars.

It is said that to this day, when New York City firemen enter a burning building and find it crammed full of junk, they employ the term “Collyer house.”

Most of them probably don’t know why.