#280 House of Mystery: The Story of the Collyer Brothers

The Bowery Boys: New York City History

Tom Meyers

Places & Travel, History, Documentary, Society & Culture

4.7 • 3.9K Ratings

🗓️ 10 January 2019

⏱️ 45 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

EPISODE 280: You'd better clean your room or you'll end up like the Collyer Brothers... New York City, a city crammed of 8.6 million people, is filled with stories of people who just want to be left alone – recluses, hermits, cloistering themselves from the public eye, closing themselves off from scrutiny. But none attempted to seal themselves off so completely in the way that Homer and Langley Collyer attempted in the 1930s and 1940s. Their story is infamous. In going several steps further to be left alone, they in effect drew attention to themselves and to their crumbling Fifth Avenue mansion – dubbed by the press ‘the Harlem house of mystery’. They were the children of the Gilded Age, clinging to blue-blooded lineage and drawing-room social customs, in a neighborhood that was about to become the heart of African-American culture. But their unusual retreat inward -- off the grid, hidden from view -- suggested something more troubling than fear and isolation. And in the end, their house consumed them. boweryboyshistory.com Support the show: https://www.patreon.com/boweryboys

Transcript

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0:00.0	Announcing the next Barry Boy's live event, Tom Myers and I will be hosting, Trim Roll,
0:07.2	please, not the Oscars, thank God, the Fifth Annual Gannick Apple Awards brought to you by
0:13.6	the Guide's Association of New York City. That ceremony will be held on Monday, March 4th
0:20.1	at the SVA Theater at 333 West 23rd Street. Gannick is an Association of Independent
0:26.6	Professional Tour Guides. They are one of the oldest and most active tour guide associations
0:32.2	in America. And they've been giving out awards, celebrating New York City culture, tourism,
0:37.1	and preservation for five years now. We've been honored to win a couple of these awards. And so
0:42.3	now here we are hosting them. We're going to pull our best hybrid of Hugh Jackman and Alan DeGeneres
0:48.5	who knows what madness will bring to this ceremony. Tickets are now on sale and they have
0:53.8	early bird specials for those who buy early. So visit Gannick.org that's g-a-n-y-c-d-org for more
1:01.2	details. The Barry Boy's episode 280, The House of Mystery, the story of the Call Your Brothers.
1:08.9	Hey, it's the Barry Boy's. Hey, support for the Barry Boy's is provided by our listeners.
1:15.2	Join us for as little as a dollar a month by visiting patreon.com slash Barry Boy's.
1:24.2	Hi there. Welcome to the Barry Boy's. This is Greg Young. And with Tom away from the show this
1:30.3	week, I thought I would alter the format just a little bit, experiment here, to visit a very
1:38.5	unusual subject. The story that you were about to hear, the strange, strange story of the Call Your
1:45.4	Brothers. Many of you have actually requested this subject as a possible episode of our show.
1:52.7	But as you'll see, this can't really be told in the same manner as some of the others.
1:59.4	New York City crammed with 8.6 million people. It's filled with the stories of people who just want
2:08.6	to be left alone. Recluses, Hermits, cloistering themselves from the public eye, closing themselves
2:15.8	off from scrutiny. Accentric erasers who never left the confines of gilded age mansions,
2:22.7	or popular icons like JD Salinger or Greta Garbo, who sought an ounce of privacy while living
	...

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