"the Collyer Brothers, the hermit hoarders of Harlem"
"barricaded in a sanctuary of junk"
"the blind and bedridden Homer Collyer lived with his devoted younger brother, Langley, the elderly scions of an upper-class Manhattan family"
"one of the world's legendary collections of urban junk...their collection came to represent the ultimate New York cautionary tale"
"a New Yorker's worst nightmare: crumpled people living in crumpled rooms with their crumpled possessions"
"the crowded chaos of the city refracted in their homes"
"New York City firefighters refer to an emergency call to a junk-jammed apartment as a 'Collyer' "
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"Homer had been Phi Beta Kappa at Columbia, where he had earned his degree in admiralty law. Langley was a pianist who had performed at Carnegie Hall"
"They became more and more reclusive as the neighbourhood went shabby on them, booby-trapping their home with midnight street pickings turning it into a sealed fortress of ephemera"
"Children chucked rocks at their windows and called them 'ghosty men'"
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"The Collyers had carved a network out of the neck-deep rubble. Within the winding warrens were tattered toys and chipped chandeliers, broken baby carriages and smashed baby grands, crushed violins and cracked mantel clocks, moldering hope chests crammed with monogrammed linen"
"Homer went blind in the mid-30's and was crippled by rheumatism in 1940. His brother nursed him, washed him, fed him a hundred oranges a week in a bizarre attempt to cure his blindness and saved newspapers for him to read when he regained his sight. Hundreds of thousands of newspapers"
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"Langley was buried in an avalanche of rubbish in 1947 when he tripped one of his elaborate booby traps while bringing Homer dinner"
"Thanks to my father, I knew all the particulars: how Homer had starved to death, how Langley's body had been gnawed by rats, how the police had searched the city for Langley for nearly 3 weeks while he lay entombed in the debris of his own house"
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"New York has long teemed with pack rats who can't pass a garbage bin without lifting the lid"
- Theresa Fox, 1940s
- Charles Huffman, 1950s
- George Aichele, 1960s
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Uncle Arthur, 88. "so habitual a hoarder that my mother used to call him the lost Collyer brother"
"Small, bent and eternally boyish, Uncle Arthur dresses in layers of Salvation Army overcoats kept closed with rusty safety pins. Like a Beckett tramp, he holds his pants up with bits of rope"
"he has turned squalor into an art form"
"Tangled mounds of twine and electrical cord climbed up gentle rolling hills of newspapers still in their plastic sleeves. A riot of shirts and jackets slopped out of stained grocery bags and onto the grubby carpet. The stove and the kitchen counters disappeared from view, lost under a couple of feet of cans, bottles and Calder-like mobiles that Uncle Arthur had fashioned out of clothespins and coat hangers. The bedroom closet was packed with newspapers from the Carter administration; the refrigerator, with English muffins from the end of the Reformation"
"He shares his apartment with Wagging II, his cat. 'Collecting junk is my hobby'....'My junk is like a friend, another person, another cat'
"An urban prospector, Uncle Arthur trails through the streets of Brooklyn, collecting the detritus of the New York night"
"You'd be surprised what you find once you look. Pennies, nickels, dimes, safety pins, jacks, dice, mirrors, small bottles, dresser handles, screws, wire, cord, moth balls, cigarette packs, pens that say different things on them, bullets"
"He particularly prizes first-edition magazines, bus transfers and parking tickets plucked from windshields"
"Like Langley Collyer, he builds barricades, and sets booby traps and nests inside his walls of junk"
