Collyer Brothers Park

Langley (1886-1947) and Homer (1883-1947) Collyer were reclusive brothers who lived together in a run-down brownstone on the corner of West 128th Street and Fifth Avenue in Harlem. The former was a retired concert pianist, while the latter was a former admiralty lawyer who had been blinded and paralyzed by a stroke. The Collyer brothers were not only recluses, but also compulsive hoarders who packed nearly every inch of their residence with stuff. Paranoid that strangers would break in and steal his and his brother’s cherished belongings, Langley setup booby traps throughout the house.

On the cold, dreary morning of March 21, 1947, police received an anonymous phone call from a man who reported the smell of human decay emanating from the Collyer brothers’ residence. When police arrived, they found the doors of the brownstone locked and the lower windows blocked by rusted-shut security bars. Determined to inspect the house, they used an axe to partially break through the front door and look inside. To their astonishment, the front hallway was jammed to the ceiling with trash. Unable to enter the house through the front door, the police ran a ladder up to a second-story window. Soon after entering the home, they found the emaciated body of Homer, sitting on the floor with his head on his knees dressed in a raggedy bathrobe, but could not locate Langley. They placed Homer’s remains in a khaki bag and removed it from the house via the second-story window. By now, an estimated crowd of about 2,000 curious onlookers had gathered on the street below. 

Over the course of the next several weeks, police launched a manhunt for Langley and work crews embarked on the grueling task of clearing the house and documenting its contents. While clearing material, not far from where police found Homer’s body weeks earlier, a crew member found Langley’s decomposed remains. Authorities concluded that Langley had accidently tripped one of his own booby traps and was crushed by falling debris while attempting to deliver food to his brother. Paralyzed, blind, and without a caregiver, Homer died of starvation several days later. In the end, police removed over 100 tons of material from the Collyer brothers’ home. Included were innumerable stacks of bound newspapers, several dressmakers’ mannequins, fourteen grand pianos, and an automobile chassis. Later that same year, the city’s public administrator deemed the house unsafe for human occupancy or use and it was demolished. 

The site remained a vacant lot until the 1960s, when it was transformed into one of the first pocket parks in not only the city, but the entire country. The civil rights movement and the episodes of urban unrest during the decade brought renewed attention to living conditions in low-income and minority neighborhoods of America’s major cities. Running for mayor of New York City in 1965, Congressman John Lindsay made alleviating blight and congestion a top priority of his campaign. As part of his platform, Lindsay called for reforming the city’s approach to the creation of new public parks. Previously, New York City Department of Parks and Recreation policy required new potential park sites to be at least three acres in size. Instead, the Democrat advocated for the creation of much smaller parks to bring green space to crowded, inner-city neighborhoods. Lindsay’s campaign plank embodied the sentiment of many other New Yorkers and organizations who for years had been calling for the creation of “pocket” parks—parks the size of only one or a few city lots—within the city. 

In late 1964, before Lindsay even took office, the non-profit parks advocacy group, Parks Association of New York, collected sponsors and funds to purchase three vacant lots on 128th Street to create the first pocket parks. One of the properties the organization bought was the former site of the Collyer brothers’ home. According to the group’s plan, each new park would be tailored towards a specific demographic. One would be a playground for toddlers and young children, the second a recreational area for teenagers, and the third (the former site of the Collyer brothers’ house) a quiet, greenery-filled sitting area for adults. The creation of the three pocket parks on 128th Street received extensive local and national media coverage and consequently ignited a new park design movement not only in New York City, but also throughout the nation. 

By the mid-1990s, Collyer Brothers Park had fallen into neglect. The City of New York purchased the pocket park and transferred ownership of it to the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation in May 1998. The department then worked with neighborhood groups to clean up and beautify the park. 

"Collyer Brothers Park." New York City Department of Parks and Recreation. The City of New York. 25 October 2000. Web. 12 October 2020 <https://www.nycgovparks.org/about/history/historical-signs/listings?id=7845>.

Herring, Scott. The Hoarders: Material Deviance in Modern American Culture. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2014.

"Strange Case of the Collyer Brothers." Life, April 7, 1947.