THE Pied Piper was nowhere to be heard, and Santa Claus wouldn’t be coming to town for a few more weeks, but something irresistible had drawn a small crowd to the West Fourth Street basketball courts in Greenwich Village on a recent Thursday morning. Huddled in groups of two and three, a few dozen men and women in their 20s and 30s glanced at one another and at their smartphones, rereading the Twitter and Foursquare messages that directed them here, waiting for something to happen.

Without fanfare a white van sailed up to the curb, and from it emerged a thin, 58-year-old man  wearing a gray suit, a tiny red bow tie and white loafers  who seemed as uncertain to meet his fans as they were excited to receive him. The gathering parted as he stepped onto the blacktop, picked up a basketball and made a few graceless attempts at hurling it at a hoop. “Yeah, match that,” he said snidely, to laughter.

As he returned to the van to be shuttled to his next mystery destination, one bystander after another  not just the supporters who had responded to his electronic siren song, but those who did not expect to see a long-forgotten figure from their childhoods suddenly materialize on a Manhattan street  felt compelled to shout at him some variation of these words, if not this exact message: Pee-wee Herman, I love you!

The next afternoon Paul Reubens, the man who has played Pee-wee Herman for more than 30 years, was sitting at a patio table in the shadow of the U.S.S. Intrepid, the aircraft carrier turned museum. Forgoing his Pee-wee costume for head-to-toe black, he was marveling at the previous day’s promotional stunt for his coming Broadway show, which had sent him whizzing around Manhattan while broadcasting his whereabouts on the Internet.