NEWARK, Nov. 19 — The magenta “praise the Lord” throw pillows: trash. The Black Santa holiday tie: a keeper. The lime-green dress shirt:

“It’s not mayoral,” said an aide with unconcealed disdain. Into the charity pile it went.

On Mayor Cory A. Booker’s final night at his bachelor-pad apartment in Brick Towers last Monday, there were important sartorial decisions to be made before the movers arrived. After living in one of the city’s most notoriously troubled buildings — where heat, hot water and elevator service were often in short supply — since 1998, Mr. Booker and two dozen other holdouts were being evicted to make way for the bulldozers.

It was a bittersweet moment for Mr. Booker, who earned himself a national reputation, cemented in an Oscar-nominated documentary, as a crusading would-be mayor who took on a negligent landlord and a vindictive City Hall by living alongside some of Newark’s most embattled tenants.

In the end, Mr. Booker and his fellow renters agreed to decamp after Newark’s Housing Authority promised to build a gentler, kinder Brick Towers to replace the forbidding twin slabs that had become magnets for drugs, violence and despair. The holdouts were also given first dibs in the new quarters.

“I like to tell people I got my undergrad degree from Stanford, but I got my Ph.D. in Newark, and some of my best professors were here in Brick Towers,” Mayor Booker said, as he rode down the blackness of an unlighted elevator for the last time. “When I walked in here, I was so innocent. I had no idea where life would take me.”