Their fates crossed in 2006 under the worst of circumstances: in Mr. Shunk’s West Village apartment, where his body had decomposed for about 10 days before it was found, upside down and trapped by stacks of his accumulated possessions, with only his ankles and his feet visible.
The cleanup specialist and the hoarder — yin and yang of New York’s real estate ecology. Now, the death of one may be a fresh start for the other. (...)
When Mr. Shunk died in June 2006, there was no money for a proper burial, said Evelyne Chemouny, a former social worker at Westbeth. Mr. Kender also died in poverty, in 2009. No major American newspaper appears to have acknowledged either man’s death.
But there was stuff. The building staff had to remove the door from its hinges to get into the apartment because there was too much stuff inside to push it open. Mr. Shunk died without a will or known relatives, so the Manhattan public administrator took control of his estate. For about a week, a team of investigators removed whatever it deemed valuable. Two years later, at auction, the Roy Lichtenstein Foundation acquired the bulk of Mr. Shunk’s archive, about 200,000 photographs and other items, valued at $2 million.
Mr. Russas called Mr. Kelly to haul off the rest.
“It was almost like an archaeological dig,” Mr. Russas said.
For a week, Mr. Kelly and his team removed items through a first-floor window, filling seven Dumpsters.
There were papers and portfolios, books and newspapers and boxes of meticulously rolled tube socks. As they threw things out, they noticed people grabbing them from the Dumpster.
On the last day, Mr. Kelly said, as he started to drive away, “I said, ‘Greg, back this truck up.’ ” He said they would have to be “stupid” not to take something. They grabbed what they could, about 2,000 items in all, and stored them in a closet in Mr. Kelly’s apartment, never really looking at what they had.
There the items sat, to the consternation of Mr. Kelly’s wife, he said. “She said: ‘Would you please get that stuff out of my house? It’s worthless.’ ”
by John Leland, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Ángel Franco/The New York Times
