After Mr. McCrary missed that deadline, management kept extending it, month after month.

“We’ve given him ample opportunity to move,” said Mr. Weber, adding that the landlord had already spent about $30,000 in fees trying to oust Mr. McCrary.

“Because of his — I’ll call it an illness — his apartment is now filled,” Mr. Weber said. If Mr. McCrary can empty the apartment by Friday, he will collect a $12,000 cash buyout, Mr. Weber said, though he doubted that Mr. McCrary would be able to change.

“He has a mental disease, and wherever he goes he will fill up that space,” Mr. Weber said.

This is not Mr. McCrary’s first attempt to clean out his apartment.

In 2011, he appeared on an episode of the A&E TV show “Hoarders.” A large team of workers removed eight truckloads from the apartment, creating trench-like walkways, but they really only put a dent in the collection. Mr. McCrary’s insistence upon managing the removal of items wound up slowing, and ultimately halting, the operation.

Within months, he was on his way to filling the apartment up again.

Two weeks ago, Mr. McCrary called in a conventional moving company, but when they saw the most fetid sections of the apartment, they refused to take the job. So he assembled his own staff of local acquaintances, some of them homeless.

He pays them a meager wage to carry items down four flights, to leave as trash on the sidewalk or load into a rented van to bring to the eight storage units Mr. McCrary has rented in Queens. He is wary of storage sites, he said, because a Manhattan storage company evicted him several years ago and quickly auctioned off a sizable collection of his parents’ memorabilia.

His efforts have become a weird kind of street theater on the block, which is in one of the city’s priciest ZIP codes. In the apartment, Mr. McCrary painstakingly sifts through his possessions while workers wait around for the next load. Neighbors and bewildered tourists renting rooms in the building through the website Airbnb watch the halting progress.