Our Cool Place series brings you into cool places. In this edition, we visit Josh Tierney, a longtime renter in Clinton Hill.
Josh Tierney moved to New York City when he was 17, and first crashed in a studio apartment in Jamaica, Queens, with a lesbian couple and their beagle. He spent his first year commuting back to Long Island to finish high school.
He found his current apartment on Craiglist in 2008 after bouncing around various sublets and living situations. He’d actually called about a different place, which the agent said was no longer available.
“She said, ‘I’ve got something else, but I don’t know if you want to look at it, nobody’s lived there in 20 years,’” Tierney said. “I was like really? That sounds interesting.”
With its wall-to-wall carpeting, stained wallpaper and linoleum floors, the place was a “disaster.” The fireplace vent was open and spewing soot into the living room, and the washroom was in the hallway. Tierney could see the remnants of furniture left by previous tenants. There were also red drapes on the walls, and one wall was even covered with a photorealistic mural of the World Trade Center.
“The whole wall,” Tierney said. “And a vinyl bar with two stools. So that kind of added to the bizarre bordello sort of vibes.”
Tierney’s record table is from the Salvation Army. He found the Lane Acclaim dining table on Craigslist and restored it. The tan settee, by Mies Van Der Rohe for Knoll, also came from Craigslist.
Laila Annmarie Stevens for Gothamist
He found the mohair velvet chair in the foreground on the street near his apartment.
Laila Annmarie Stevens for Gothamist
A rat also briefly took up residence in the apartment.
“His name was Cheddar,” Tierney said. “I would see him often – I would hear him first, actually, skittering around in the garbage can. He would take all my books and magazines and rip up the pages to make a nest.”
Tierney and his roommate tore out the carpets and painted the floors, took down…
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