2 Brooklyn Paper • www.BrooklynPaper.com • (718) 260-2500 March 20–26, 2020
A fresh beginning
Downtown cleaners help out the city’s worst hoarders
By Kevin Duggan
Brooklyn Paper
A Downtown Brooklyn
husband-and-husband couple
has made it their business to
clean out some of the city’s
worst hoarder homes.
Julian Bannister and Yannick
Jules-Bannister, cofounders
of the company New
Beginning Cleaners, say they
have come to see how people’s
quarters are both a safe haven
and an expression of their personal
mental woes.
“Once you go home, you
take your work home, you take
your family argument home,”
said Julian Bannister. “It becomes
a thing of how bad are
your thoughts and how taken
over are you from them.”
The entrepreneurs launched
their company some four years
ago — initially as a maid service
— but their very first job
proved to be more challenging
than a mere surface scrub.
“Our first case, I remember
well, was floor-to-ceiling
garbage, there was no way to
walk, the woman was sleeping
on magazines and books and
you couldn’t even see a coach
nor a bed — we just could not
leave her in that situation,”
Bannister recalled.
The two men and another
co-worker cleared out the
woman’s Bronx apartment in
four days, carrying out hundreds
bags of trash via the
building’s elevator for 12-13
hours each day.
“Yannick was standing in
the elevator behind the bags
— 20 bags — squished in, I
would go in the next elevator,
squished in,” Bannister said.
“We were taking out 300 bags
of garbage from a one-bedroom
apartment.”
In the following years, they
cleared out many more homes,
wading through piles of rubbish,
such as utility bills from
the 1960s and several dead
pets, but what surprised them
most was the clean appearance
of some hoarders when leaving
their chaotic abodes.
“They are some of the
most well-dressed people,”
he said.
One of several memorable
cases the cleaners encountered
was a man who dressed in
clean suits and sneakers, but
once the scrubbers entered his
apartment, they found he was
storing hundreds of bottles of
his own urine, due to issues
with his bowels.
“You’re talking about 450
bottles of pee we counted,”
Bannister said. “It was the
most toxic place we ever
had.”
The man suffered from arthritis
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him to do a lot of ordinary
tasks, leading him to spiral
into depression and his girlfriend
leaving him. His unkempt
apartment also infected
the entire building with a vile
odor and the Bannisters grew
concerned when they heard
from a neighbor that the man
once had two dogs but that,
eventually, they had stopped
barking.
One of their workers soon
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when they discovered a perfectly
severed head of a Rottweiler
Husbands Yannick Jules-
Bannister and Julian
Bannister clean some
of the city’s messiest
hoarder homes. (At left)
A hoarder’s bedroom in
East New York.
but never found the rest of
the poor hound, or the second
pooch.
“He’s always stated to this
day that he doesn’t know how
the dog’s head got decapitated
perfectly,” Bannister said. “We
never found the other one.”
Another woman in Flatbush
11-year-old son — who died in
the 1980s on a highway crash
— despite the belongings being
environment, it had to be most
roaches we’d ever seen in any
situation.”
Bannister said that the
cleaning team tries to make
their clients understand that
they are putting their own
health at risk, and that a clean
space can help to foster good
mental health as well as a better
lifestyle.
“You’re letting go of the
materials but you’re also letting
the depression,” he said.
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Photos by New Beginning Cleaners
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