Harlemitis

Across the street from a row of renovated brownstones on 5th Avenue is one of the smallest official parks in the city––and one of the most disturbing slices of Harlem history. Its grassy rectangular imprint on the block is a ghost of the brownstone that used to stand on the corner of 128th Street and 5th Avenue. This is Collyer Brothers Park, which takes its name from the two reclusive brothers, sons of Manhattan gentry, who in 1947 were discovered dead in their three-story brownstone under 100 tons of their own garbage.

Homer and Langley Collyer were written about in medical journals and even had a disease (Collyer Brothers Syndrome) named in their honor to account for this neurotic inability to dispose of things. Perhaps there should be a corollary to this disease as it applies to their stubborn refusal to leave Harlem, even as it descended into an entropic urban wasteland. Perhaps we can call it Harlemitis.

Though 99% of people who know Harlem know it as the vortex of black urban life, its existence in the years before the depression and before the Collyer Brothers descended into madness speaks of a very different neighborhood. Harlem was affluent, posh, and overwhelmingly white, and if the Collyer Brothers had had their way, perhaps it would have remained that way.

Or perhaps it’s turning back.

In Homer and Langley Collyer’s stubborn refusal to leave Harlem, even when most white residents had fled to the suburbs, one might be tempted to tease out a metaphor for the neighborhood now and its continued resistance to gentrification. Many Harlemites know that this resistance, though powerful, cannot last. Collyer Brothers die, and neighborhoods like Harlem do gentrify, though perhaps more slowly than most. --MIK AWAKE