At that point he was feeling neither spry nor lucky. His mother was ill, he was drinking on and off, his back pain was serious and he was feeling too down even to shave, which explained the long beard. He might have ended up like his father, who was also five feet tall and suffered chronic pain, and who ended up a heavy drinker. He could have felt perpetually insulted that people kept telling him he looked like a mischievous mythical gnome.

Instead, “I finally figured out I liked it,” Mr. Buzzutto said recently. He was dressed, as usual, in a green hooded sweatshirt and green pants. “And other people liked it. So why not?” He started embracing the role, putting shamrock and leprechaun pins on his hat, wearing all green, all the time. Well-wishers who might have feared offending a short man with a red beard instead felt permission to approach him. “Anyone who looks like this, and doesn’t know he looks like a leprechaun,” Mr. Buzzutto explained, “is a dunderhead, for crying out loud.”

Over the years, Mr. Buzzutto has become a quasi-mythical creature whom Yonkers locals delight in spying in the mundane tasks of life: shopping at Stew Leonard’s, drinking a glass of milk at a bar, sitting on the wall outside his house. As he works in his garden, an elaborate display in a mostly industrial neighborhood, passing cars honk their hellos, one after the other. Mr. Buzzutto graciously tips his hat each time.

“By now, it’s Pavlovian,” he said. “I go to New York City, and every time a car honks, my arm flies up.” When someone — and it’s not only small children — asks if he’s a real leprechaun, he answers diplomatically, “I’m the realest leprechaun you are ever going to meet.”

Mr. Buzzutto, who grew up small in Yonkers public housing and feels he’s been fighting to prove himself ever since, developed a vague sense of his own celebrity, but the modern age has delivered a much more satisfying measure of it. Someone created a Facebook page in his honor (“The Yonkers Leprechaun That Lives on Roberts Aveee”), and it now has 6,951 fans. A few of them have suggested he run for mayor (of Yonkers). Someone named Sahar Rabadi posted that “my mom makes me beep the horn at him because she thinks he will bring me luck and I will get married.” Said Mr. Buzzutto, “It’s an ego trip.” For those concerned with authenticity, there is the matter of Mr. Buzzutto’s last name. Is he even Irish? “A little,” he said, a guilty look flashing across his face — at least one quarter.