RIDGEFIELD, Conn. — The characters of Maurice Sendak may live in the imaginations of children around the world, but many of those characters were born in a wooded residential neighborhood on the outskirts of this small town, in a rambling shingle house where Mr. Sendak lived and worked beginning in the early 1970s.

Since his death in 2012, his estate and foundation and a group of devoted local Sendakians have been working to make this town into what some day may be the primary pilgrimage site for his fans, the way Sante Fe, N.M., is for Georgia O’Keeffe or Amherst, Mass., is for Emily Dickinson, one of Mr. Sendak’s favorite authors. The urgency to create a place for the public to visit increased in 2014 when the artist’s estate, citing Mr. Sendak’s wishes late in life, withdrew more than 10,000 pieces of original artwork and other material — the heart of his archive — from the Rosenbach Museum and Library in Philadelphia, to which Mr. Sendak lent pieces for decades and which organized more than 70 exhibitions of his work.

In his will, Mr. Sendak — widely considered one of the most important children’s authors of the 20th century and beloved for “Where the Wild Things Are” — wrote that he wanted his home here to operate “as a museum or similar facility, to be used by scholars, students, artists, illustrators and writers, and to be opened to the general public” as the Maurice Sendak Foundation’s directors saw fit. In 2014, in an interview at the home, foundation members spoke of plans for small, scheduled public group tours. But in recent interviews with the foundation’s leadership and several Ridgefield Sendak supporters, it appears that it might be a very long time before the general-public part of Mr. Sendak’s desire comes to pass.