THE little wooden house on the corner of Charles and Greenwich Streets has inspired some odd behavior. One man was compelled to throw a rooster into its yard as he rode by on his bicycle.

As Suri Bieler, one of the house’s owners, recalled recently, she discovered the bird recovering in her magnolia tree. For the next three months, Ms. Bieler fed her visitor slices of pumpernickel, at which point the guy on the bicycle returned.

“I’d like my rooster now,” Ms. Bieler remembered him saying. The man, she said, explained that he’d been rooster-sitting for his sister while she was out of town, and she had now returned to claim her pet.

Ms. Bieler assumed that he thought the rooster would be more comfortable on her property, with its bright patch of lawn and climbing roses, than his.

As urban oases go, this one is unusually tempting, like a contented child’s drawing of a happy home.

Once, a young runaway found a safe place to sleep there; another time, a woman asked if she could use the lawn as a dog run. On weekends, there’s often a crowd peering through the iron gates at the dollhouse-like scene, murmuring and pointing.

“They say all sorts of things, none of them true,” said Eliot Brodsky, who is married to Ms. Bieler and who once overheard the leader of a tour group claim that circus people lived there.

In fact, Ms. Bieler and Mr. Brodsky are the owners of Eclectic/Encore Properties Inc., a prop rental company in Chelsea. Mr. Brodsky, as it happens, also makes ghoulish rubber masks, which he exhibits and sells at collectors’ conventions like last summer’s Maskapalooza in New Jersey; their son, Jack, now 14, is an enthusiastic gamer. But they are not circus people. For the last two decades, they have been the stewards of a house that wasn’t built to last, though by most estimates, it has been around for at least 200 years.

The house certainly wasn’t built to move, as it did in 1967, trucked on a flatbed down Second Avenue from its original home at York and 71st Street by its inhabitants, Ingrid and Sven Bernhard, when the Archdiocese of New York razed the block to build a home for the elderly.

Maybe the house was thrown together in an afternoon by a couple of guys with a bucket of beer, as George Boyle, the architect who renovated it in 2001, surmised, its wide cedar clapboards erected on the stamped earth of what was probably the barnyard of a farm in the rural north of post-Revolutionary Manhattan. In any case, as Mr. Boyle said recently, the key to its startling longevity lies mostly in its charm.

It does engender strong feelings. Ms. Bieler had pined for the house since she was a child in the late 1960s, when she spotted it from the back of her parents’ station wagon. The family was heading home to Virginia after a New York City vacation, and had lost their way looking for the Lincoln Tunnel.

As Ms. Bieler explained it, the car paused at the stop sign at Charles and Greenwich Streets, and she was transfixed by a domestic moment glimpsed by chance: a freeze-frame of a little white house, dwarfed by climbing roses and sunflowers, and a cheerful-looking man with a mug in his hand standing in the doorway. “Look, look,” she remembered shouting as the car pulled away. “He’s the luckiest man in New York.”

More than a decade and a half later, Ms. Bieler was living on the Upper West Side, working as a prop designer on and off Broadway and running a prop rental business from her apartment on West 84th Street. One day, while visiting a friend who had an antiques store in the West Village, she was driving around looking for parking when she came upon “her” house. On another visit, she noted a “For Sale” sign.

It took two years to buy the house, she said, as one owner flipped it to another to pay a debt. It was vacant for much of that time, and squatters moved in, panicking Ms. Bieler, who was still struggling to unravel its ownership and make a deal. “The phone numbers changed in the middle,” she said, “and the broker. It was a very difficult purchase.”

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By PENELOPE GREEN

Source: New Yok Times – U.S.A.