Jammed in a stack of contemporary art was a painted wood panel bearing the images of a cherub, a spaniel and a small girl in a filmy blue dress. Mounted in the middle of this sentimental grouping was a clock face missing its hands.
The fragment of Victoriana had been bequeathed to Dr. Lubetkin by his father, Jack, onetime proprietor of Ye Olde Treasure Shoppe in Greenwich Village.
“Other people get left stock and bonds,” said Dr. Lubetkin, a 69-year-old psychologist. “I got tchotchkes.” Most he sold on eBay. But he held on to the panel. “There was something very surreal and serene about it,” he said.
A couple of weeks ago, Dr. Lubetkin was idly trawling the Internet for information on Homer and Langley Collyer, urban hoarders known in the 1930s and ‘40s as the Hermits of Harlem.
Elderly scions of an upper-class Manhattan family, the brothers had barricaded themselves in a sanctuary of clutter at the northwest corner of Fifth Avenue and 128th Street.
Wary of intruders, they had rigged booby traps of debris, one of which triggered accidentally during the spring of 1947. Langley was entombed in a junk avalanche, leaving the blind, bedridden Homer to starve.
During his online search for the Collyers, Dr. Lubetkin stumbled on a newspaper photo of the police investigation. Amid bundles of newspapers and mounds of rubbish, an officer pointed at a grandfather clock. “I looked closely at the clock,” Mr. Lubetkin said, “and I thought, ‘My God, that looks familiar!’”
Sure enough, the panel was identical to the one in his living room stack, even down to the handless clock face. “I suddenly realized my panel had belonged to the Collyers,” Dr. Lubetkin said. “This is particularly ironic, since I am the director of the Institute for Behavior Therapy, where we treat many hoarders.”
As borne out in newspaper accounts of the time, Jack Lubetkin bought the panel at an auction held to dispose of the brothers’ effects. According to estimates of the time, the worldly goods in their four-story brownstone weighed in at 180 tons.
Workmen carted out pianos, cornets, bugles, lamps, chandeliers, bowling balls, plaster busts, baby carriages, toy railroad trains, the folding top of a horse-drawn carriage, the chassis of a Ford Model T, dressmaker dummies, the brothers’ stockpile of books, their mother’s hope chests of monogrammed linen, and medical specimens from their father’s gynecology practice.
The first sale of the “Collyer Collection” drew 300 people to a seventh-floor loft at the old Journal-American Building on Williams Street, near the entrance to the Brooklyn Bridge. One-hundred and fifty items had been culled, including Panama hats, rusty bayonets and a school desk in which Homer had carved his initials. The buzz of the room was a nine-foot mahogany grandfather clock that played “The Campbells Are Coming,” the bagpipe hymn of a Highland Scottish clan.
“We’re now selling the biggest piece of junk in the house,” cried the auctioneer, Sidney Salomon, whom The New York Times described as “a man not given to suave approach.” Mr. Salomon implored onlookers: “Don’t duck out.”
Jack Lubetkin and a lawyer named Braunstein bid spiritedly at $ 10 a clip.
Mr. Braunstein made his final offer at $ 300. A muted excitement flowed through the crowd as Mr. Lubetkin raised it to $ 310. “The gavel rapped three times and it was his,” The Times reported.
That turned out to be the highest price fetched by any Collyer relic. (The auction and another a week later brought a little more than $ 2,000.) Mr. Lubetkin reckoned he would put the clock in the window of his store. “It’ll make a striking advertisement,” he said.
Barry Lubetkin does not remember seeing the clock in the window of the store, which was one floor below his family’s apartment. “Then again,” he said, “I was 3 years old when the Collyers died.” He has no idea what happened to the rest of the clock.
He does recall his old man regaling him with tales of the Collyers. “My father referred to the brothers as ‘crazy,’” Dr. Lubetkin said. “But I think he had a secret place in his heart for them. His store looked like their house.”
You may have seen this coming, but Dr. Lubetkin is something of a hoarder himself. When not treating patients for phobias and depression, he rummages flea markets for therapy-related knickknacks he calls “psycho-lectibles.”
His office stash includes autographs of William James and B.F. Skinner, a poster of a rock band called the Freudian Slips, phrenology charts and a comic book titled “Dr. Id, Psychologist of the Supernatural.”
The pièce de résistance is a five-and-a-half-foot-long steel sign that once hung over a psychic’s tent in Coney Island. It reads: MIND HEALER. “I tell patients I’m not that presumptuous,” Dr. Lubetkin said.
The Collyer panel is not destined to become the cornerstone of his trove of psychiatric oddments. “I plan to keep it in my living room,” said Dr. Lubetkin, who has taped hands to the clock, on which time now stands still. “Now that I know that the panel belonged to the Collyer brothers, I’ll build an altar to it.”
Yahoo Local News – New York Times
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