Where did it come from--that quaint little house with the fanlight over the door and the flower-starred grassplot in front?
Did it fall from the skies or was it built in a minute like the delectable little house in "Peter Pan"?
Neither.

It has stood there right along for half or three-quarters of a century, only you didn't happen to know it.

You have stepped around the corner into Greenwich Village, that's all.
"In spots there is an unwonted silence, as though one were in some country village," says Joseph Van Dyke.

"...

There are scraps of this silence to be found about old houses, old walls, old trees." Here, as in the fairy tales, all things become possible.