Somewhere among the stuffed animals and fire logs, the bellows, copper kettles, hatchets and adzes, the powder horn, horse skull, snowshoes, sleds, razor strop, ox-yoke chandelier and crank-operated washing machine are Rob Schleifer’s 21st-century necessities.  “I ask people to find the refrigerator,” said Mr. Schleifer, who finally points it out: an all-but-invisible half-size unit. It’s camouflaged forest brown, like his televisions, VCR, radio, telephone, computers, printers and just about everything else in the fifth-floor Manhattan walk-up his family has had since 1947.  New York’s cliff-dwellers have long found inventive ways of customizing their living spaces, and untold secrets lie behind the city’s apartment doors. But Mr. Schleifer, a 61-year-old bachelor body builder and philologist who compiles dictionaries and writes esoteric articles about lexicography, has carried an obsession with the frontier past to new lengths. For reasons he finds difficult to explain, he has spent much of the last 30 years turning his one-bedroom rental on Avenue A near 14th Street into his version of a cluttered colonial cabin in the woods where young Abe Lincoln might feel at home.  His walls are painted to look like planks. His toaster, Crock-Pot, corkscrews, pencil sharpener, egg-slicer, and hot plate — there is no stove, but he cooks mostly vegetables anyway — have all been painstakingly rusticated with walnut and mahogany stain. Punching bag and boxing gloves, too. And makeshift clouds of wadded cotton hang from the ceiling.  “I’m always yearning for the mountains and pristine wilderness,” said Mr. Schleifer (pronounced Sch-LYE-fer), who once fled to the Colorado wilds to live in a lean-to with only a bag of potatoes and wild plants to sustain him.  He began by trying to hide the white walls. “The color of death,” he said. “It wasn’t like a plan from the beginning. The more changes I made, the more I wanted to do to create a complete environment.” He etched woody patterns into the door frames and moldings. He broke into the walls and temporarily reopened two bricked-up fireplaces. He turned the bathroom steam pipe into a tree, complete with curling serpent.  “I know nothing about antiques,” he said. But he filled the apartment with found treasures. A stuffed cat. A zither he bought at auction for 45 cents. An ox yoke he turned into lighting. A horse skull picked up in the woods in Florida. A World War II radiation detector. Handcuffs. Brass knuckles, two sets.  “About 95 percent of the people are thrilled by it,” he said. The remainder, he acknowledged, include his girlfriend of eight months, a translator of French and Spanish.  He grew up prosaically enough in the same Stuyvesant Town neighborhood. His father owned an air-conditioning repair company, and he and his twin brother, Ronald, went to local schools. He attended the State University at Albany, where he majored in history, and in 1970 decamped for Colorado to build houses, sleeping out for a time in the woods. He returned in 1979, joining his uncle George, a painter, in an $87.72-a-month rent-controlled apartment at 217 Avenue A that the uncle had lived in since 1947.  After several years, his uncle moved to a nursing home, and Mr. Schleifer left for Oklahoma State University to teach technical and scientific writing, letting an aspiring actor, Bill Pullman, move into the apartment.  “I thought New York is a wacky place with probably a lot of faux-Colonial cabins,” recalled Mr. Pullman, who went on to appear in more than 50 films, including “Ruthless People,” “Sleepless in Seattle” and “Independence Day.”  Mr. Pullman remembered the place fondly. “In the bathroom there was a painted knothole with an eye looking in,” he said. “It wasn’t like Martha Stewart’s version of a faux-grainy cabin.”  The neighborhood, on the other hand, was quite dicey. “The super was thrown out of his window — twice — and lived,” Mr. Pullman said.  Mr. Schleifer returned in 1985, repossessing the apartment for a time with his uncle, taking a job maintaining the air-conditioning in the Barneys store and working on a Macmillan high school dictionary. He taught himself workable Latin and Greek, he said, and in 1995 published “Grow Your Vocabulary,” a Random House trade paperback. He wrote for the Chicago-based language quarterly Verbatim, contributing articles like “Alchemical Calques or the Transmutation of Language.”  He saw a big opportunity as the millennium approached, betting heavily on a Y2K crash. “My analysis was most persuasive,” he recalled. “The only problem was everything was wrong.” He was wiped out. Meanwhile, his landlord, unsure how the rent-controlled apartment had gone from the uncle to Mr. Schleifer, tried to evict him. The rent was then $120.12 a month. They settled on $500 a month and a shift to rent-stabilization. It has since gone up to $638 a month.  But now, though it is hard to imagine, he is taking it all down, like a frontiersman breaking camp. He was lured by his landlord’s buyout offer and the depressed housing market. “There are so many great deals, I want to buy.”  He has to be out by mid-March. Will he re-create the cabin in his next home? “The work that I put into this place I can’t imagine ever doing it again,” he said, before reconsidering. “Oh, I’ll do something.”
A rent-controlled apartment is the stuff of city legend, but Rob Schleifer has chosen a distinctly rural approach to his very urban dwelling.