The tenants of the Carnegie Hall Studio Towers — some of whom filed a lawsuit on Thursday to prevent their eviction — can’t seem to help it. Like a freshly jilted spouse, they slip into the firstperson plural when talking about Carnegie Hall, even though its management is trying to clear them out to gain space for education programs. After decades of living and working upstairs from the concert hall, the tenants refer to Carnegie as “we,” not “they.”

One evening last week, more than two dozen of them climbed the creaking wooden stairs of photographer Josef Astor’s skylit eighth-floor studio and crowded beneath its high, slanting ceiling. Don Shirley, an 80-year-old pianist who’s lived there for a half-century and is the only current tenant to have played downstairs, was ensconced in a chair up front. Crammed toward the back was WNYC host Jonathan Schwartz, a relative youth in his late 60s, who has lived in the building for 37 years.

The tenants assembled there with their lawyer, Arlene Boop, to explain their plight to elected officials and seek their help, but the nuances of the situation weren’t so easy to convey. When Assemblyman Richard Gottfried, speaking loosely, referred to Carnegie Hall as the tenants’ perceived enemy, painter and meditation teacher Ashtiana Sundeer interrupted immediately. “I don’t know if it’s that polarized,” she said. “Are they our enemy?”

Likewise, in an interview with The New York Sun, Carnegie Hall’s executive and artistic director Clive Gillinson said, “I’m genuinely sad about it. It’s not something we set out to do.”

Carnegie has only conceptual designs of what the new space will be, and it faces a $150 to $200 million fund-raising campaign, not yet underway. But Mr. Gillinson said the hall had explored every other option before arriving at wholesale eviction. He noted that all rent-control tenants have been promised accommodations at least as nice as their current studios, with any rent differential to be paid by the hall.

He spoke with impassioned eloquence about the woeful inadequacy of existing spaces for Carnegie’s overflowing educational programs, of the need for children to study music in inspiring spaces, of the intention “to save the things of real value” in the architecture of the studio towers when the gut-level renovation begins in 2009.

“In the end, the greater public good has to have value in this discussion,” he said.

Yes, it does, and if you go sheerly by the numbers, 115,000 people served each year by the education programs versus the 45 people still in the studios, it’s obvious who wins. But it isn’t that simple.

The fight — which heated up last week when Ms. Boop filed suit in New York Supreme Court on behalf of 33 tenants, winning a temporary restraining order protecting them from eviction until their September 17 court date — is between two sides that have immense respect for Carnegie Hall’s past.

Designed by Henry Hardenbergh, the architect responsible for the Dakota and the Plaza Hotel, and built between 1894 and 1898, the towers have seen an extraordinary array of artists pass through their doors. The young Marlon Brando lived there and once wrote his neighbor — a tenant at the Carnegie Hall’s towers until she died this summer — a thank-you note for telling a crowd of teenage fans he wasn’t home. Agnes DeMille, George Balanchine, and Isadora Duncan worked there. Marilyn Monroe and Lucille Ball studied there. Leonard Bernstein composed and Enrico Caruso made his first recording there.

Over the decades, the community has diminished as Carnegie has taken back more units. The tenants who remain are part of a tradition, and forcing them out would spell the end of it. It would also mean the demise of another rare thing: affordable Manhattan work spaces for artists. “They’re not so easy to come by,” a 12th-floor tenant who runs a multimedia company, Judson Rosebush, said.

“That’s not the nature of the real estate beast in the city.”

That beast almost swallowed Carnegie Hall in 1960, when the building was set to be demolished. Isaac Stern saved it, and the city bought it for $5 million. As the tenants point out, and the Carnegie Hall Web site confirms, the fight had the active support of the people in the studios.

Portrait photographer Editta Sherman, 95, was one of them. Her daughter, Carole Sherman, was unequivocal about what would happen if her mother, a tenant since 1949, lost her studio and had to move. “She would die,” Ms. Sherman said flatly. “Because her whole life force is about working, photography, these portraits, these people. She just cannot live, exist, in another environment.”

Carnegie Hall is a National Historic Landmark and a city landmark. It is possible that internal landmarking — a difficult but attainable designation — could save the studios.

“You have the privilege of being in an antique right now,” Mr. Rosebush told the elected officials last week, looking up at the diagonals of the ceiling, turnbuckles, and windows that he was sure were meant for a painter or a photographer. “In a hundred years from now, 50 years from now, you’re gonna want this back, and if you destroy it, you’re not gonna have it back.”