Collyer brothers facts for kids

Langley Collyer
Langley Collyer (right) with attorney, 1946
Born	Langley Wakeman Collyer (1885-10-03)October 3, 1885 Manhattan, New York City, U.S.
Died	c. March 9, 1947(1947-03-09) (aged 61) Manhattan, New York City, U.S.
Cause of death	Asphyxiation
Resting place	Cypress Hills Cemetery, Brooklyn
Nationality	American
Alma mater	Columbia University

Collyer Brothers Park
Type	Pocket Park
Location	2078 Fifth Avenue
Nearest city	New York, New York
Area	1,500 square feet (140 m2)

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, were two American brothers who became infamous for their bizarre natures and compulsive hoarding. For decades, the two lived in seclusion in their Harlem brownstone at 2078 Fifth Avenue (at the corner of 128th Street) in New York City where they obsessively collected books, furniture, musical instruments, and myriad other items, with booby traps set up in corridors and doorways to crush intruders. Both died in their home in March 1947 and were found dead (Homer on March 21, Langley not until April 8) surrounded by more than 140 tons of collected items that they had amassed over several decades.

Since the 1960s, the site of the former Collyer house has been a pocket park, named for the brothers.

House contents

Police and workmen removed approximately 120 tons of valuables, junk and other items from the Collyer brownstone. Items were removed from the house such as baby carriages, a doll carriage, rusted bicycles, old food, potato peelers, a collection of guns, glass chandeliers, bowling balls, camera equipment, the folding top of a horse-drawn carriage, a sawhorse, three body forms, painted portraits, photos of pin-up girls from the early 1900s, plaster busts, Mrs. Collyer's hope chests, rusty bed springs, the kerosene stove, a child's chair (the brothers were lifelong bachelors and childless), more than 25,000 books (including thousands about medicine and engineering and more than 2,500 on law), human organs pickled in jars, eight live cats, the chassis of the old Model T that Langley had been tinkering, tapestries, hundreds of yards of unused silks and other fabrics, clocks, fourteen pianos (both grand and upright), a clavichord, two organs, banjos, violins, bugles, accordions, a gramophone and records, and countless bundles of newspapers and magazines, some of them decades old, and thousands of bottles and tin cans and a great deal of garbage. Near the spot where Homer had died, police also found 34 bank account passbooks, with a total of $3,007 (about $45,126 as of 2024).

Some of the more unusual items found in the home were exhibited at Hubert's Dime Museum, where they were featured alongside Human Marvels and sideshow performers. The centerpiece of this display was the chair in which Homer Collyer had died. The Collyer chair passed into the hands of private collectors upon being removed from public exhibit in 1956.

The house, having long gone without maintenance, was decaying: the roof leaked and some walls had caved in, showering bricks and mortar on the rooms below. The house was deemed "unsafe and [a] fire hazard" in July 1947 and was razed later that month.

Most of the items found in the Collyer brothers' house were deemed worthless and were disposed of. The salvageable items fetched about $2,000 at auction; the cumulative estate of the Collyer brothers was valued at $91,000 (equivalent to $1,365,621 in 2022 ), of which $20,000 worth was personal property (jewelry, cash, securities, and the like). Fifty-six people, mostly first and second cousins, made claims for the estate. A Pittsburgh woman named Ella Davis claimed to be the long lost sister of the Collyers. Davis' claim was dismissed after she failed to provide a birth certificate to prove her identity (years earlier, Davis claimed she was the widow of Peter Liebach, another wealthy recluse, from Pittsburgh, who was found murdered in 1937). In October 1952, the New York County court decided that twenty-three of the claimants were to split the estate equally.

In popular culture

• A Collyer's Mansion (also Collyer Mansion or just Collyer) is a modern East Coast firefighting term for a dwelling of hoarders that is so filled with trash and debris it becomes a serious danger to the occupants and emergency responders.
• The Collyer brothers' story was first directly fictionalized by Marcia Davenport in her novel My Brother's Keeper (Scribners, 1954), reprinted as a Popular Library paperback.
• In the 1955–1956 "Classic 39" season of The Honeymooners ("The Worry Wart"), affable neighbor Ed Norton, chiding Ralph Kramden for his thriftiness, quips "Congratulations on that 93 cent gas bill, Ralph ... You broke the all-time low gas bill record, set by the Collyer brothers in 1931!"
• In season 1, episode 20 of The Odd Couple ("A Taste of Money"), Felix and Oscar return $2,000 (found in trash by their 11-year-old neighbor) to a pair of elderly recluse hoarders, apparently inspired by the Collyer brothers. The episode premiered on February 26, 1971.
• A 1973 episode of the television show The Streets of San Francisco titled "The House on Hyde Street" was inspired by the Collyers.
• The 1995 movie Unstrung Heroes features two uncles whose lifestyle and apartment are a direct homage to the Collyer brothers. The film was based on a 1991 memoir by Franz Lidz, who in 2003 published Ghosty Men: The Strange but True Story of the Collyer Brothers, New York's Greatest Hoarders. Ghosty Men also chronicles the parallel life of Arthur Lidz, the hermit uncle of Unstrung Heroes, who grew up near the Collyer mansion and was inspired by the brothers.
• In 2002, Hirohiko Araki dedicated a chapter to the brothers in his series The Lives of Eccentrics.
• In the sitcom Frasier episode "Dinner Party", the eponymous character and his brother are compared to the Collyer brothers by their father.
• In September 2009, Random House published E. L. Doctorow's Homer & Langley, a work of historical fiction that speculates on the brothers' inner lives. Taking considerable historical liberties, the novel extends their lifespans into the late 1970s and switches the brothers' birth order.
• In an interview with the Criminal Minds Fan Site in 2016, Breen Frazier stated that the story of the Collyer brothers inspired the Season Five episode "The Uncanny Valley", which features a criminal who is a type of hoarder known as a "collector".
• Matt Bell's short story "The Collectors" focuses on the months leading up to the Collyers' deaths, as well as exploring Langley's memories of their past and the effects on the people who discover their bodies. It was first published in 2009 as a chapbook, then included in Bell's debut collection How They Were Found in 2010.
• The brothers are also the inspiration behind Richard Greenberg's play The Dazzle which played in London to excellent reviews in the winter of 2015–16. Andrew Scott and David Dawson played Langley and Homer respectively, in the production by Emily Dobbs, which was staged at the former site of the Central Saint Martins School of Art on Charing Cross Road.
• They were the inspiration for a Law & Order: Special Victims Unit episode called "Alta Kockers". Wallace Shawn and Judd Hirsch played the brothers.
• They were the inspiration in the TV series 9-1-1 Season 1 Episode 9 titled "Trapped", in which two brothers (one of which is blind) are trapped in their own home which is filled to the ceiling with stuff as a result of being extreme hoarders. The brothers had set up an elaborate system of tunnels to get around and booby traps to catch anyone trying to get in. The story differs in this case as the firefighters are eventually able to navigate through the tunnels and booby traps and save the brothers.
• Episode 3, season 3 of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel has Abe and Rose Weissman discussing the Collyer Brothers as they contemplate where to move after losing their apartment.

See also

In Spanish: Hermanos Collyer para niños