If your home contains more than two bookcases, you probably know the cautionary tale of Homer and Langley Collyer. After the deaths of their parents, the aging bluebloods holed up in their stately Harlem rowhouse, once a picture of Gilded Age polish, and became a public curiosity. Homer, who began losing his vision in the early 1930s, almost never left the house; Langley slipped out at times when he was unlikely to be seen, in search of additions to collections that filled the house: books, newspapers, tin cans, clocks, baby carriages, pianos and more.
The building, filled to its ceilings, grew increasingly dilapidated; Langley’s paranoia about suspected intruders led him to build mazes of detritus to throw them off. In 1947, after reports of strong odors were reported, a huge crowd on the street watched as police and city officials pried their way inside to look for the brothers’ bodies. They found Homer, but it took weeks to uncover Langley, who had been crushed beneath one of his own towering piles.
