Over the next decade, the building passed through a succession of owners who put in heat, new plumbing and new electrical wiring. In 1999, when the current landlord planned a two-story addition atop Ms. Doukas’s apartment, she suggested a compromise: would he build a terrace out of her kitchen window and allow her to use the roof of the one-story addition that stretched out behind the loft building? He agreed, and down came the roof garden. She tucked it into an urban canyon that is now swathed in AstroTurf and edged with tomato plants, lilies and hydrangeas, fennel, squash, raspberries and herbs. At its south end rises a metal structure, like something out of Fritz Lang’s “Metropolis,” built to baffle the vent noise from the Wendy’s and the Taco Bell below. It sort of works.

As Mr. Brady weakened, so did the new garden. “There wasn’t a whole lot of time for it,” Ms. Doukas said. “My time was for him.”

By early 2008, Mr. Brady was gone. Ms. Doukas scattered his ashes among the plants. He has good company. The ashes of their two dogs, which had died a few years earlier, are spread between the magnolia tree and the lilac bush. (Ms. Doukas, ever resourceful, repurposed their carriers as planters.)

These days, the garden, like Ms. Doukas, who is working on a memoir of her life here, is thriving again. She finds joy in the riot of nasturtiums, clematis, roses, kale and blueberries she added this year (never mind the smell of French fries). Upstairs, in the loft, the wood-burning stove is now a side table, an old life reimagined as something new.

“I keep it around,” she said, “because it keeps me humble.”

WEST 23RD STREET

More than two years ago, Gerald DeCock, a gentle 52-year-old hairstylist and artist who has been living for the last 18 years in one of the Chelsea Hotel’s top-floor studio apartments, came home from a morning yoga class to find his roof garden destroyed: its planters and vines had been chainsawed into arm-size sections and set out on 23rd Street. His was one of seven or eight gardens that had bloomed between the brick parapets of this fractious bohemian ecosystem, some for decades. And it was, perhaps, the most modest: two outdoor “rooms” bounded by slim planters, from which honeysuckle, Virginia creepers and trumpet vines erupted. There were pots of lavender and grasses, and annuals tucked in each June.

Like every habitat here, this one was deeply personal. Mr. DeCock is a visual artist who makes films, photographs and paintings, huge swirling canvases that recall spin art. His studio apartment is an art piece in itself, its brickwork, floors and ceilings spangled with Mardi Gras beads; gold, silver and copper leaf; squares of colored foil; fluorescent paint; vinyl album covers; and photographs marked with Sharpies, all of which had seeped out the kitchen window into his garden, like the tendrils of a vine seeking the sun.

Like the huge roof forest, also razed, that had grown outside the slate-roofed “pyramid” apartment behind him — planted, perhaps, by the filmmaker Shirley Clarke, who lived in the pyramid for decades — Mr. DeCock’s garden was collateral damage in the war that had been going on between the hotel’s management and its unique tenant body since the ouster of the longtime manager Stanley Bard in 2007. Or so it seemed to the tenants. (Calls to the current manager, Arnold Tamasar, were not returned.)