Collyer Brothers - Family

Family

The Collyer brothers were sons of Herman Livingston Collyer (1857–1923), a Manhattan gynecologist who worked at Bellevue Hospital, and Susie Gage Frost (1856–1929), a former opera singer. Their parents were first cousins. The Collyer family alleged their roots could be traced to a fictional ship that supposedly arrived in America from England a week after the Mayflower. The family was descended from the Livingston family, a New York family with roots going back to the 18th century. Robert Livingston was the first of the Livingston family to emigrate to America in 1672 – fifty-two years after the Mayflower. The couple had a daughter, Susan, who died as an infant in 1880. The following year, on November 6, 1881, they had their first son, Homer Lusk, and in 1885 Langley was born. They were living in a tenement while Herman interned at Bellevue. As a child, Homer attended PS 69. At the age of fourteen, he was accepted to the College of the City of New York as a "sub-freshman", earning his bachelor's degree six years later.

Both sons attended Columbia University, which had just relocated to its present-day Morningside Heights campus. Homer obtained a degree in admiralty law, while Langley is said to have received a degree in engineering, though Columbia University states it has no records of his attendance; Langley made attempts at being an inventor. Langley played concert-level piano and had long, flowing hair. Over the years, as both brothers' eccentricities intensified, Langley tinkered with various inventions, such as a device to vacuum the insides of pianos and a Model T Ford adapted to generate electricity.

Dr. Herman Collyer, with his wife and two sons, moved into the house in Harlem after April 1910 (they are reported as living at 109 East 54th Street in the 1910 Federal Census, taken 23 April 1910). Dr. Collyer was known to be eccentric himself, and was said to frequently paddle down the East River in a canoe to the City Hospital on Blackwell's Island, where he occasionally worked, and then to carry the canoe back to his home in Harlem after he came ashore on Manhattan Island. He abandoned his family around 1919, a few years before he died. No one knows why Dr. Collyer abandoned his family, or whether his wife moved with him into his new home at 153 West 77th Street when he left behind his house in Harlem. Nevertheless, Homer and Langley Collyer stayed in the family house after their father left. Dr. Collyer died in 1923, and Mrs. Collyer died in 1929. After their parents died, the Collyer brothers inherited all their possessions and moved them into their house in Harlem.