SQUISHED.(The Talk of the Town)(Patrice Lumumba Moore)

Publication: The New Yorker

Publication Date: 12-JAN-04

Bookmark this article Print this article Link to this article Email this article Digg It! Add to del.icio.us RSS

COPYRIGHT 2004 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.

In retrospect, it almost has the ring of a creative-problem-solving challenge: can you fit more than fifty industrial-size trash bags' worth of junk in a ten-by-ten room? As we now know, thanks to Patrice Lumumba Moore, the answer is yes--but barely. Moore, who is forty-three, returned from the corner store on the Saturday after Christmas and squeezed, as usual, past the nearly barricaded door to his tiny but stuffed-to-the-ceiling Bronx apartment, which implausibly housed perhaps the city's largest and most varied private collection of magazines: Advertising Age, Ebony, Harvard Business Review, Penthouse. Moments later, he heard an ominous noise overhead. It was the beginning of a domestic avalanche.

"Books were falling everywhere, and I tried to catch some--that's where I cut my knees," Moore recalled...

Read the full article for free courtesy of your local library.