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BROOKLYN WEEKLY, MARCH 22, 2020
A NEW BEGINNING
Two Brooklyn cleaners offer relief for city’s worst hoarders
BY KEVIN DUGGAN
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,
co-founders 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 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 four
years ago — fi rst as a maid
service — but their very fi rst
job proved more challenging
than a mere surface scrub.
BY KEVIN DUGGAN
As doctors prepare to
treat a coming wave of
coronavirus patients, the
Brooklyn Hospital Center
in Fort Greene will begin
pre-screening potentially
infected patients with basic
thermometers and other
tools at a new outdoor tent
— which will reduce the
hospitalized population and
ease the load on the healthcare
system, said Borough
President Eric Adams.
“We must fi nd innovative
ways to allocate resources
and fl atten the curve,” said
Adams in a statement. “The
Brooklyn Hospital Center’s
new pre-screening tent will
“Our fi rst case, I remember
well, was fl oor-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
alleviate the burden on
their emergency room, and
allow those with the greatest
level of need to receive
the proper care.”
The make-shift facility
operates in front of
the hospital’s Ashland
Place emergency room,
and Brooklynites exhibiting
symptoms can receive
a quick examination —
and those showing severe
symptoms, such as trouble
breathing, will be diverted
to the emergency room. Patients
will also be asked
about their medical histories,
and doctors may send
those with pre-existing conditions
to the emergency
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
room, even if they show
mild or no symptoms
Patients at the new facility
will be billed as if it
were any other hospital
screening.
The move comes as medical
facilities around the city
are dealing with a surge in
hospital visits related to
the coronavirus — including
the Brooklyn Hospital
Center, which has already
treated three people with
the infection.
As of March 16, the virus
had a 19 percent hospitalization
rate, according
to the Borough President’s
offi ce.
Governor Andrew
The outdoor facility will be used to pre-screen potentially infected patients. Photo by Kevin Duggan
Cuomo on March 15 pleaded
with President Donald
Trump for federal assistance,
saying the state was
currently unable to “slow
the spread of the disease to
a rate that our state health
care systems can handle.”
The Fort Greene hospital’s
president, however,
said the facility’s staff were
working tirelessly to combat
the virus.
“We are working around
the clock, and our excellent
doctors, nurses, and other
providers are diligently
keeping up to date with
best-practice guidelines,
and coming up with solutions,
such as this tent for
pre-screening,” said Gary
Terrinoni. “Together we
will get through this.”
Screening for help
Fort Greene Hospital unveils outdoor
coronavirus pre-screening tent
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 that made it hard
for him to do some ordinary
tasks, leading him to spiral
into depression and his girlfriend
leaving him. 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
stumbled upon a grizzly fi nd
when they discovered a perfectly
severed head of a Rottweiler
beneath piles of trash,
but not the rest of the 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.”
A hoarder’s bedroom in East
New York.
Husbands Yannick Jules-Bannister and Julian Bannister clean
some of the city’s messiest hoarder homes.