Man who once led gilded life has until Friday to remove hoarded items from upscale NYC home
As a baby, Kevin McCrary was on the cover of Look magazine, along with his mother, a radio and TV personality of the 1940s and 1950s.
Photos show him and his family with famous politicians and actors, including Bob Hope. The photos, along with an almost unbelievable amount of other items jammed into McCrary’s $1,386-a-month rent-controlled apartment on the Upper East Side of New York City, are scheduled to be thrown out Friday, pursuant to a court eviction order, unless he can somehow clear out the unit before then, the New York Times (reg. req.) reports.
An earlier effort, televised on the A&E program Hoarders, removed eight truckloads of items from McCrary’s home in 2011, but it soon filled up again, the Daily Mail reports. Multiple pictures show rooms so crammed with belongings that McCrary has to come and go via the building’s fire escape, the newspaper says.
At times, McCrary has slept in his car (also jammed with personal belongings) or on the street because of a lack of space in his own home. His living expenses are paid by a trust fund.
Always a collector, he said the accumulation of things in his home exacerbated after the deaths of this parents, Tex McCrary and Jinx Falkenburg, in 2003.
McCrary intended to sell online many of the items he stored “temporarily” at his home, but collecting proved to be a lot easier than making sales. “It was an extremely flawed business model,” he told the Times.
Meanwhile, in an unrelated case, a Cincinnati man featured on the TLC program Hoarding: Buried Alive remains in jail for violating his probation after being convicted of fire code violations, according to WCPO, WKRC and WLWT.
A Hamilton County judge ruled Tuesday that he won’t release John Clements until his home is fully compliant.
