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.
He found the mohair velvet chair in the foreground on the street near his apartment.
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 the wallpaper and whitewashed behind it, and covered the linoleum with rugs.
“I’ve been collecting these for years,” Tierney said, of the dozen-odd oriental rugs in his living room. “Whenever I travel it’s like a souvenir. And that could be traveling somewhere interesting, or just traveling up the block – this one I found in the garbage.”
Tierney sourced two of his rugs from the garbage, two at yard sales, one each from flea markets in Budapest, London and Morocco, and one at the erstwhile Salvation Army on Fourth Avenue in Manhattan.
The midcentury wall unit is one of Tierney's most expensive items. He purchased it for $1,500 during the depths of pandemic lockdown and believes he overpaid.
The apartment’s heater is in the kitchen. Tierney believes it’s no longer manufactured, and that his roommate has become the world’s foremost expert on repairing this particular model.
The paper dragon is from Manhattan’s Chinatown, and the oversized takeout container is from San Francisco’s Chinatown. “It’s from that touristy fortune cookie factory,” Tierney said. “I bought the fortune cookies because I knew they came in that container, and I wanted the container.”
“Everything that’s out there that’s new is junky, so there’s no point in buying it,” Tierney said on Saturday as he straightened a ram’s horn bookend on his shelf. Though he prefers to “shop in the garbage,” he makes exceptions for buying new bedding, mattresses and pillows.
Tierney pointed out the Art Deco lamp and mohair velvet chair.
“This also came from the trash around the corner,” Tierney said.
When Tierney’s company downsized during the pandemic, he took this couch home from the office. The coffee table came from a friend who was getting rid of it.
The gold mirror above the fireplace belonged to Tierney’s grandmother. She got it at the Salvation Army.
Tierney does not have a social media presence and isn't interested in becoming an influencer. He currently runs creative strategy for a marketing agency and has also worked in photo styling, prop styling, costume design, events and more.
He says making do with less is a hallmark of the events business.
“Going to Ikea is an event trick,” Tierney said. “We would even go to Ikea and buy things and use them at the event and then return them.”
He recalled doing that with 40 or 50 of their faux-sheepskin Ullerslev pelts.
“The budget was tight, I had to make up margin somewhere, so they got returned,” Tierney said. “They have a very generous return policy.”
Tierney’s grandfather gave the octopus lamp to his grandmother as a gift in the 1970s. He says he later saw the original vase that inspired the design in a museum in Crete.
Tierney has always collected Navajo items. “I’m not sure if you’re allowed to do that anymore,” he said. “But I do.”
Tierney said most people are surprised upon seeing his apartment.
“You come in the building and there’s been some… deferred maintenance, let’s say,” he said. “As you walk up, the carpet is coming off of the stairs, there’s old stained linoleum in the halls, and fluorescent lighting, and dirt on the paint walls.”
“And then the door opens and it’s that very New York moment where it’s like ‘OK. I wasn’t expecting this.’”
Josh Tierney in the Clinton Hill apartment he’s rented since 2008.
The vintage deadstock letters on the WC, which is in the hallway, came from a store in San Francisco.
