Harvesting a hoarder's accumulation

Excerpts from a story in the New York Times:

... 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 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...

To find out what they (and others) harvested, read the rest of the story.