I wanted to meet there so we could talk about Winkler’s rotten childhood. Winkler suffers from severe dyslexia, which was undiagnosed until his early 30s, and he talks openly about his lifelong struggles with reading and math. He even co-wrote a popular series of books for middle-school kids about a plucky little boy named Hank Zipzer, who lives on this very corner and whose days are filled with comical disasters caused by his differently functioning brain. Winkler is the son of Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany, and in his talks in schools and bookstores, he always mentions them. “The kindergartners like when I do their German accents, and the older kids like hearing how mean they were,” he said. The combination of his dyslexia and family history make for an interesting pathology, marked at once by shame and determination. One way he copes is to stay busy, to make himself useful, to work. So on that warm fall day, he flew to New York from his home in Los Angeles to promote his latest book, the first in a new series for children called “Alien Superstar,” about a blue-skinned alien with six eyeballs who is mistaken for an actor in costume. Our meeting had been squeezed between radio interviews, a book signing in Scarsdale, appearances on “The Today Show” and “The Tonight Show” and some school visits.

He noted some changes to the building’s exterior, then stepped back and pointed to the window of his childhood bedroom, the place where he hid from his parents’ rages and danced alone to the music from “West Side Story,” rehearsing the moves from memory while dreaming of a way out. He recalled the moment nearby when he accidentally stepped into traffic and was grazed by a van; the driver carried him into the building. As we walked away from all that heavy emotion, down 78th Street, he pointed out the stairwell where he had his first kiss; the Chirping Chicken on Amsterdam Avenue that used to be a drugstore; the fire station where he once knew the firemen’s names.

At the corner of Amsterdam, a mail carrier called out, “Mr. Henry!” Winkler returned the greeting, then put cash in a homeless girl’s hands. Receipts fell out of his wallet, and he chased them down the sidewalk. He got stuck at the door of a bakery, holding it open for a woman with a stroller, then a second stroller pushed by a woman who stared at him as he waved to her kid. “All these babies!” Then he went up to the counter and accidentally cut the line. After realizing what he did — he had ordered his slice of poundcake by then — he apologized, introducing himself, asking the young couple he cut in front of their names and the origins of their names, then paid for their order.

“I had coffee in my last interview,” he said as we sat on a bench in a bus stop by P.S. 87, his old elementary school. “And now I’m flying out of my shoes.” He opened the bag and started eating.

As people came into the bus stop and stared, Winkler greeted them and offered his seat. He was a little jet-lagged and apparently hungry, doing his best between bites to answer my probing questions about his early trauma, although it was almost impossible to hear his replies over the clatter of jackhammers.

Winkler’s father, Harry, a cultured, commanding little Napoleon, was fluent in maybe six languages, and used more than one of them to berate his son. His mother Ilse’s weapon of choice was a hairbrush. Winkler recalled a morning at breakfast when he clowned over a bowl of Rice Krispies, then cowered as his mother leaped to her feet to attack him. After he figured out what they thought of him, he did his best to tune them out, which eventually turned his living room into a war zone. “I learned to squash a lot,” he told me at the bus stop. “But eventually you can’t squash anymore, because there’s no more room to squash.”

His parents had so narrowly escaped the Nazis when they left Berlin in 1939 that even one day later, Harry’s brother tried but could not get out. He died in the camps, as did most of their extended family. Harry smuggled out the family jewels, because he knew they were never going back, but he led Ilse to believe that they would be heading home soon. She missed Germany and suffered from depression, and when Winkler was born in 1945, she had a nervous breakdown and was institutionalized, though he wasn’t sure exactly when or for how long. “It’s all hazy,” Winkler said, “and I didn’t like them to the point where I never asked them a question.”