In a city where residents are both doomed and blessed to live crammed on top of one another, one New York City politician shared an apartment building with two of his great nemeses. As mayor, he earned the keys to Gracie Mansion but would not relinquish his rent-controlled apartment downtown. And rather than buy a home, as the American dream decrees, he preferred to spend his entire adult life as a renter, right until the very end.

His name was Edward I. Koch.

“My first decision as mayor-elect involved housing,” Mr. Koch wrote in “Mayor,” his 1984 autobiography. “I decided that I would keep my apartment.”

Mr. Koch, who died on Friday at 88, was born in the Bronx and raised in Newark and Brooklyn, but he spent most of his life living in Greenwich Village, beginning in 1956 with an apartment on Bedford Street.