In search of closeness to the natural world, she used to spend time in Grand Ferry Park, a local sliver of green in a desolate industrial area near the East River. Sitting on the boulders facing the water, she would read, toss a ball to her dog, Stella, and watch the tide lap in and out.
Sometimes the tide yielded treasures. One summer day — she remembers she was wearing a vintage cotton dress — the water washed in a pair of tiny iron toys, a bull and a man in a broad-brimmed hat. Another time she found a battered typewriter, so mired in the mud that she could salvage only a few keys.
Both personally and professionally, Ms. Lutz is enchanted by what old objects reveal about past lives, and to her these finds were thrilling. “They felt like notes in a bottle,” she said. “I love imagining where stuff like this comes from and how it got here.”
Four years ago, having had her fill of loft living, she moved to a railroad apartment in a 1930s row house in neighboring Greenpoint. But the relics of those dreamy hours by the water made the journey with her. The bull and the man in the hat sit atop her large wooden desk. A salvaged letter A from the typewriter is on display in a shadow box she built from a discarded drawer, sharing space with eccentric treasures like a two-inch-high glass jar holding the whiskers of a departed cat.
Ms. Lutz’s apartment commemorates her years in Williamsburg in another respect: Nearly every piece of furniture was rescued from local streets.
“I walked the dog four times a day,” she said. Often, when she took the dog for a final walk late at night, she would find things on the street that she might otherwise have ignored.
“With a dog, you’re going slowly because she’s sniffing around,” Ms. Lutz said. “So you notice more than if you’re heading somewhere quickly.”
Once she found a bed frame, draped with a pebbly white crocheted spread. “The frame was in pieces, thank heaven,” she said, “because I couldn’t have carried it otherwise.” Another time, after a lively night out with friends, she discovered a 60-pound mahogany bookshelf that she lugged home atop her slender back. “Being a little drunk,” she explained, “gives you superhuman strength.”
Still other finds included a black rotary telephone bearing the number CI 8-1296 that had mysteriously made its way to Brooklyn from City Island in the north Bronx, and a small doll with stringy blond hair and a missing foot — “wounded and bereft in an interesting way,” said Ms. Lutz, who keeps the doll on her bed. A plaster statue of a woman, her arms crossed tightly over her stomach and glowering as if she had done one too many loads of laundry, presides in the kitchen like a malevolent household goddess.
In the age of the bedbug, Ms. Lutz no longer trolls the streets in search of castoffs, but her apartment is a tribute to those meandering journeys. It also feels like the ideal setting for a person enamored of the 19th century, one whose taste for Steampunk style predates the current vogue for Victorian Gothic.
Ms. Lutz, who teaches at Long Island University and is the author, most recently, of a book titled “Pleasure Bound: Victorian Sex Rebels and the New Eroticism,” is, like so many New Yorkers, living a life very different from the one into which she was born. She grew up in Colorado, the daughter of farmers who had moved there from the Midwest, and in many respects she reinvented herself when she came East after college.
“I came to New York to become someone else,” said Ms. Lutz, who just turned 40, “even down to changing my name. In Colorado I was Debbie. Here I’m Deborah.”
Her apartment, for which she pays $1,200 a month, retained aspects of its original character, but she has done a great deal to enhance its charm. In the kitchen, she painted the walls candy pink, exposed the tin ceiling, and surrounded it with a border of the original flocked wallpaper. She replaced the modern knobs on the French doors with vintage ones, but wisely left untouched a glass transom painted with red roses, along with the arched doorway that leads to the kitchen.
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