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“I’ve always liked clutter,” says Slate music critic Jody Rosen as he surveys his Red Hook pad full of vintage treasures. “I like having something to look at. The trick is reining it in, especially if you collect things.” With two floors of rooms—plus a generous roof space and modest backyard lot—Rosen is able to indulge his acquisitional urges, displaying his record, vintage-postcard, cabinet-photo and old-time-bicycle collections without turning his home into a cramped warren.
A resident of Red Hook’s “The Back” neighborhood since 2003, Rosen has warmed up to the area after leaving his Chelsea bachelor pad (featured in TONY in 2001, issue No. 294) and starting a family. “You didn’t see any Williamsburg hipster doofuses around at first,” he says, but notes that gentrification is now well under way. His three-year-old son, like any self-respecting toddler, is riveted by the docks, cranes and barges that appear in Buttermilk Channel out the window, between views of the Statue of Liberty and Governors Island. With the Queen Mary 2’s NYC parking space only blocks away, “it’s like a skyscraper outside your door,” says Rosen, appreciative of the massive cruise ship’s periodic arrival.
Rosen and his wife invested in their home via renovation and flea-market furnishings, putting in floor-to-ceiling bookshelves and glass-windowed doors repurposed from an office building. “The things you hoard become your design aesthetic,” says Rosen. “I’m a fetishist for old stuff, from the 1890s to about 1925.” That includes a 19th-century Indonesian bed and a wall of group photographs, featuring century-old sports teams and partygoers wearing dapper suits and boasting flapper-style curls.
“I’m aping the aesthetic of my ex-landlords, who had a rococo look, lots of little crap,” says Rosen of his space, where the pile of children’s toys in one corner contrasts with a squat red heating stove in another. “But really, nothing can be truly nice with a three-year-old in the house.”
