This was originally written for The Economist online, but never published. Since its writing, clearing out hoarded homes has become this cleanliness obsessive’s undesired but default specialty (made much more complicated by the return of bedbugs to the US). Let’s just say, I am a very dutiful friend and family member. One person’s garbage is another person’s treasure, indeed. But most of it is garbage.
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When I was a child an elderly artist couple lived in the duplex next door. They sometimes hired me for menial, labor-intensive tasks that emanated from an endless array of items that would emerge from their darkened apartment, such as shelling buckets of walnuts, or rolling pennies stored in pickle jars. Ruth and Chet often joined me in these tasks at which I labored on our shared porch, aware that I would never be able to conquer the sheer volume on my own. A strange smell of moldering paper with a hint of cat urine wafted from their door. One day, I was invited to venture inside. Narrow trails led from room to room, but no other spaces in the rooms were accessible; piles of junk, much of it newspapers and books, filled every area. I wondered where they conducted the tasks of daily living, such as cooking, sleeping, or bathing. This was my first encounter with the urban pack rat, or hoarder, as they are empirically known.
As a New Yorker, I have observed a type of pack rat that may exist primarily in a metropolitan environment: people who define themselves as artists, and view their hoarding as a form of collecting vital to their process of living outside of society’s expectations. These folks bunker themselves from external surroundings that they perceive to be hostile and alienating by hoarding. Though hoarders exist in all settings, the urban pack rat artist could be a unique variety, and their members are legion.
Hoarding, or disposophobia (fear of throwing anything away) has only recently come to the attention of the medical establishment, and is defined therein as a type of obsessive-compulsive disorder. Brain imaging of hoarders has displayed variations in cerebral glucose levels that differ from non-hoarders. But defining pack rats merely as medical specimens is removing them from a cultural context. One pack rat I know says that he developed this lifestyle because this was how he grew up. His family were scientists and artists who constantly gathered materials for study, piling them in the confines of the apartment. He points out that before the information age and the internet, it was difficult to procure data unless the materials of study were present. Indeed, a common creative personality is one that thrives only when surrounded by material chaos.
Can a line be drawn between collector and pack rat? Collectors seem to be individuals who curate their collections, and impose an order on what could become chaos. In a pack rat, the process of editing and curation seems absent; the items they hoard often carry little aesthetic value, and are meaningful only to them. To the rest of us, their stuff seems like garbage at best. At worst, it is a public safety issue.
No New York legend is more intriguing than that of the Collyer Brothers, two recluses whose Harlem brownstone was broken into by the police in 1947 when it was reported that one of the brothers had died. Tons of personal effects and trash that had accumulated over decades were hauled from the building as local citizens watched in stunned disbelief. The Collyer Brothers were not ignorant miscreants, but highly educated scions of a culturally elite family. In their crammed surroundings they created an alternative world of their own existence. Is this not a creative expression on some level, a collection?
No, says Robin Zasio, Psy.D., director of the Anxiety Treatment Center in Sacramento, CA, and a specialist on hoarding. “In my opinion, there is no inherent value in being a pack rat. Hoarding is a behavior that is driven by anxiety and fear. If they don’t acquire the item, the hoarder fears the experience of discomfort of not having it.”
One of my dearest friends is an interior designer and antiques dealer, highly sought after for his impeccable taste. His holdings include beguiling examples of furniture, ephemera, dolls, and taxidermy from days gone by. I would define him as a collector, as he possesses curating skills. But he sometimes has difficulty discarding of things that most of us consider crap. We have been in the process of vacating a Catskills farm that we have shared for years, and the details of what should be kept and what should be thrown away have become objects of heated dispute. I viewed the dozens of mildewed bed pillows as health hazards destined for the bonfire, while my friend argued some kind of sentimental attachment to them. In the end, I managed to wrest them from his hands and throw them on the pyre when he wasn’t looking.
At the further end of the spectrum are folks like Ruth and Chet, people who perambulate by using tiny trails through each room, or have closed off rooms when they became too gobbled up to be used any longer. This is no minor statement in New York City, where small living spaces necessitate minimal domestic accumulation. In the co-op building where a friend lives, whom I’ll call Mark, such a pack rat occupant has been causing problems. The vermin, dust, and mold that are the by-products of hoarding are considered health and safety risks by the neighbors. Mark, a collected artist, is particularly concerned that a fire could start in the pack rat’s apartment, spreading to his own, where he stores irreplaceable work. Knowing that the pack rat in question is also an artist, I ask Mark if it is not her right to collect material? “No,” sighs Mark resolutely. “Her habits come from the fear of having nothing, from the fear of having no self-identity, which she believes the stuff around her provides. She keeps herself in the safety of her denial. She has an addiction.”
Dr. Zasio concurs. “Someone who collects tends to engage in this behavior for pleasure. Hoarding is a condition that tends to get out of control. Mold can begin to grow, causing toxicity in the environment. These factors can present dangers to the community.”
Yet as a study of outsider culture, pack rats fascinate. Maurice, a man who began frequenting Greenwich Village circa 1905 and bore a striking resemblance to Walt Whitman, was one of the neighborhood’s best-loved characters. His hoarding was triggered by the death of his girlfriend, when he began visiting buildings on the Upper East Side to collect cast-off books from the wealthy. When a fire destroyed his first hoarded apartment, he promptly began a second. Upon being evicted from the second apartment for being a safety hazard, Maurice stored his books and sundries in the public lockers that then lined the subway platforms. Maurice was required to spend all day inserting quarters into innumerable lockers to insure the protection of his collection. Because of his hoarding, Maurice was more or less personally responsible for the removal of subway lockers.
A dismaying display of pathology, or an eccentric creative need to preserve the detritus of our culture? The line between pack rat and urban artist-collector is disputed and obscure.