07/11/2007

What is this, the Collyer mansion?
By Tom Range, Sr.

On March 21, 1947, a phone call was received at the 122nd police precinct in upper Manhattan.  The caller identified himself as "Charles Smith" and announced, "There is a dead man at 2078 Fifth Avenue."  This residence was well known to the police.  It was occupied by a pair of brothers, reclusive bachelors.  The brothers had been mentioned in newspaper articles since 1939, when Homer (born 1881) and Langley (1885) Collyer refused to pay their gas bill.  Through the years, the Collyer brothers had had run-ins with the bank holding their mortgage on their home, the electric company and other utilities that had shut down service to the pair.

The house was located at the corner of 128th Street in Harlem.  The Collyer family had occupied the mansion since at least 1909, the time when Harlem had just recently become assessable to the masses by the extension of the subways uptown.  The racial mix of the neighborhood had changed so that, by the 1940s, Harlem had become primarily African-American.

The father of the Collyer brothers, Dr. Herman Collyer, a Manhattan gynecologist, abandoned his family in 1909, and the two brothers, still in their twenties, continued to live with their mother, Susie Gage Frost, an accomplished pianist.  The Collyer family traced its roots back to the voyage of the Speedwell, the sister ship of the Mayflower.  Both young men attended Columbia University with Langley obtaining a degree in engineering and Homer becoming an admiralty lawyer.

It was known to the police and throughout the neighborhood that Homer was stricken blind in 1933 and became paralyzed in 1940.  He never left the house again.  The younger Langley foraged most nights for food for his brother and himself, existing on scraps of meat, peanut butter and oranges, the fruit that Langley thought would restore Homer's eyesight.

It took a long time for the police to investigate the call.  They had to chop away the Collyers' bolted front door, and were confronted by a solid mass of newspapers, cartons, old iron, and broken furniture.  Finally a patrolman went up a ladder to the second floor, opened a shutter, and swept his flashlight into a cave-like burrow.  Homer was sitting on the floor in a bedroom.  He was naked except for a thin and tattered bathrobe, his long white hair hung down to his shoulders, and his hand rested near a shriveled apple.  He had been dead for some hours. 

After this disclosure, the police tried to find Langley.  At first they thought he was probably hiding in the house.  The building was packed almost solid from top to bottom with incredible masses of junk, pierced by winding tunnels.  As they cleared passageways the police found pianos variously counted as from five to fourteen in number, parts of a Model T Ford cannibalized by Langley to rig up a source of electricity, a rowboat complete with oars, a library containing thousands of books on law and engineering, ancient toys, old bicycles with rotting tires, "girly" photographs, dressmaker's dummies, and ton after ton of newspapers, the fruit of three decades of hoarding.

Even though Homer's body was extracted from the premises, a smell of death continued to emanate from the house.  Tons of refuse were removed from the three-story building and its basement. 

Finally, on April 8, 1947, 18 days after the tip-off to the police of Homer's death, the body of Langley Collyer was found, incredibly just 10 feet from where Homer had died.  He evidently had been returning from a nightly foray for food and had tripped a booby-trap he himself had set to thwart burglars.  He had been crushed by huge bundles of newspapers that he had stockpiled for his brother to read once his "orange" cure was successful.  The two brothers are buried in the family plot in Cypress Hills Cemetery next to their parents.

The Collyer mansion ultimately had to be razed, being in such disrepair that it was a hazard to the neighborhood.  Throughout this period and to this day the identity of the mysterious caller "Charles Smith" has not been uncovered.  The loss of the reclusive pair is in itself a tragedy; the one from starvation, the other by being crushed to death.  But the condition of the house in which they lived served for years as an example for every mother admonishing her son when looking in to his room.  "What is this, the Collyer mansion?"