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The Urban Historical Series
The series | New York Sawed in Half | Ghosty Men | Rough Amusements | Typhoid Mary    
 
Ghosty Men
By Franz Lidz

The Strange but True Story of the Collyer Brothers, New York's Greatest Hoarders

Homer and Langley Collyer moved into their handsome brownstone in white, upper-class Harlem in 1909. By 1947, however, when the fire department had to carry Homer's body out of the house he hadn't left in twenty years, the neighbourhood had degentrified, and their house was a fortress of junk: in an attempt to preserve the past, Homer and Langley held on to everything they touched.

The scandal of Homer's discovery, the story of his life, and the search for Langley, who was missing at the time, rocked the city; the story was on the front page of every newspaper for weeks. A quintessential New York story of quintessential New York characters.