The Nolita-ization Of The Yippies

Soon, very soon, all of Manhattan below 96th Street will be one big museum:

A man named “Kenny the coke freak” once lived in the basement of the three-story brick building at 9 Bleecker St., just off the Bowery. In the early 1970s, when Kenny no longer could pay the rent, the Yippies moved in.

More than three decades later, the counterculture group founded by Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin is looking to turn its Bleecker Street headquarters into a museum. The state Office of Cultural Education is recommending that the Board of Regents grant a five-year provisional charter to the Youth International Party — which spearheads an annual march calling for the legalization of marijuana — at its March meeting next week. The Regents are likely to follow the recommendation.

“It’s sort of going to be like the Hard Rock Cafe of radical culture,” a longtime member of the Yippies, Dana Beal, a co-curator of the museum, said during a tour through the building yesterday. Mr. Beal, who has a shock of white hair and a moustache like Mark Twain’s, has inhabited 9 Bleecker St. since 1973.

The items to be on display will include some of the cremated ashes of acid guru Timothy Leary and an American flag blazer donated by Hoffman’s son, Andrew, who lives in Indonesia.

Completing the transition to a Hard Rock Cafe-type of institution requires some flexibility, however:

“We’re still working out the admission issue,” Mr. Beal, said. “The Yippies were always more anarchist than anti-capitalist . . . everybody knows they’re against capitalism, but nobody knows what to replace it with.”

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According to the application submitted to the Regents, the museum will become “a tourist attraction in New York City for intellectuals interested in the history of the new left, the smoke-in movement, the Ibocaine movement, Dylanology, the connection between rogue CIA agents and the Kennedy assassination including the housing of over 100,000 pages released under the JFK documents act.”