Free Republic

Neighbors say an eyesore is not only hurting their community's image, it's costing taxpayers money. Lewis County says a so-called "hoarder's" properties are such a disaster that they're risking the health of neighbors. Neighbors say they feel like they're living next to a junkyard, as there's rats and mice all over the place. But this is actually the yard and home of Victor Bonagofski. According to court documents, Bonagofski's two properties near Centralia have been the subject of legal cases for about nine years. The county put a lien on some of the land and a judge ruled the defendant...

y father never had much use for fairy tales. The fifth of five brothers raised in a one-bedroom tenement on the Lower East Side, he preferred real-life grotesqueries. And so at bedtime, I would listen raptly to his urban horror stories, tales that filled the dark with chimera, bogeymen, golems.The most macabre was the tale of the Collyer Brothers, the hermit hoarders of Harlem. In lugubrious tones not unlike Boris Karloff's, my father described the vague aura of evil that had endowed the four-story brownstone on the northwest corner of Fifth Avenue and 128th Street for much of the 1930's...