At the Yippie Museum, It’s Parrots and Flannel (Published 2008)

ASIDE from the oversize photograph of Jerry Rubin sporting a giant Afro and the three-foot-high marijuana leaf painted on the wall, the most noticeable museum-worthy facets of the Yippie Museum and Cafe in Greenwich Village may be the people hanging out there. On a recent Thursday evening, there seemed to be a greater concentration of men and women with long gray hair, flannel shirts and mellow smiles than one was likely to find anywhere else in Manhattan.

Among the group was Gloria Waslyn, a wide-eyed woman with a royal blue and gold Amazonian macaw perched on each shoulder.

“This is Merlin and this is Baby,” Ms. Waslyn said, introducing the birds. “They’re parrots for peace.”

A year after the museum’s opening last January in a rundown three-story building at 9 Bleecker Street near the Bowery, the institution is still very much a work in progress. Its choppy first year may be a reflection of the precarious state of the building itself, for 35 years a crash pad and watering hole for politically minded allies of the Yippies, the leftist prankster group.

In 2004, after the building was sold and the Yippies faced eviction, they joined forces with the National AIDS Brigade, a social services organization. As Yippie Holdings, they bought the building with a loan from a private lender for $1.4 million and remained on the premises.

Last month, however, when the Yippies failed to file for an extension on their loan on time, the lender removed their name from the deed to the building, again placing them in peril of eviction.

For now, the building remains in Yippie hands as the group prepares to sue the landlord in case negotiations with him go poorly.

Although the building is home to little in the way of museum exhibits, the plan is to display artifacts like old Yippie newspapers and protest fliers, and to open what the group is calling the Lenny Bruce Academy of Comedy in the basement.

A. J. Weberman, a Yippie veteran who helped start the museum, hopes that interest in the movement will be rekindled by a forthcoming film by Steven Spielberg, “The Trial of the Chicago Seven.” Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman, the founders of the Youth International Party, whose members were called Yippies, were later among those charged with inciting a riot at the 1968 Democratic National Convention.

“It’s going to help for sure,” Mr. Weberman said of the project. “It’s going to show that we played a part in American history.”

On a recent Thursday, a few dozen people gathered in the small ground-floor museum for a night of folk music and speeches about issues like water pollution. A man led the crowd in a rousing chant of “Water not weapons.”

For a moment, the place seemed to fulfill its mission of preserving the Yippie spirit. By the end of the evening, everyone joined in a lively rendition of “This Land Is Your Land,” performed with three guitars, a banjo, a flute, a clutch of clapping singers and a pair of squawking parrots.