When he moved into the Greenwich Village townhouse in September 1955, it was a nine-unit S.R.O. A graduate of the Yale School of Drama with a degree in production — directing, essentially — Mr. Bennett had returned from the “obligatory two years in Hollywood: not very successful” and was desperate to find a place of his own after staying for too long with a friend in a tiny Upper West Side apartment. A colleague at J. Walter Thompson, the advertising agency where he worked, told him about a room on Morton Street occupied by someone who needed to get out of her lease.

After moving into the room, he got an inkling of why she might have wanted to leave. For a number of years, the house had been a bordello, and not everyone, it seemed, was aware of its changed status. “The last of the ladies had lived in my apartment,” Mr. Bennett said. “I had some rappings on my window at night asking for her.”

He moved upstairs in 1961, when new owners took over the building. After learning that they were turning the first and ground floors into a duplex and adding two small bedrooms at the back of the house, Mr. Bennett made a suggestion: “I said, ‘As long as you’re extending the house, why not give me a bedroom and a terrace?’”

The landlord, realizing she could legally raise his rent to $125 a month for the larger space, agreed.

In his new bedroom, he installed floor-to-ceiling bookshelves for the collection he inherited from his great-aunt Harriet Lane Levy. A copy of her portrait — sketched by Matisse — hangs above the nonworking fireplace.

Later, in the 1980s, he had two loft beds built: “the master bedroom and the guest room.” Unfortunately, while he is in remarkably good health for a nonagenarian, he said, a balance problem has prevented him from climbing up to his double loft bed.

“I hated giving that up,” said Mr. Bennett, who now sleeps on the sofa in the living room. “It was very cozy, and I could spread out.”