Steal This Building: Former Yippie HQ Is Up For Grabs

The Yippie! Museum, which long served as a home for counterculture and protest movements in Greenwich Village, is up for rent just months after it was compelled into foreclosure.

Corcoran Group Real Estate is listing the entire three-story, 6,000-square-foot building at 9 Bleecker Street for $22,500 a month, calling it an “exceptional opportunity” to rent a building with “old world charm ready for a new establishment.”

That old world charm includes 40 years of dissent. Left-wing activists organized dozens of protests within 9 Bleecker’s walls: against nuclear power, during political conventions, in support of the legalization of marijuana. Two countercultural newspapers, the Yipster Times and Overthrow, were also published there.

In 2004, Yippies, or members of the leftist Youth International Party, who had long occupied the space, bought the building and later opened a cafe and museum inside. Since 2009, they had fought foreclosure by a lender. They were ordered to vacate the building in January.

The loss of the building also means the loss of a home for Yippie head Dana Beal, who moved into the building in 1973. Beal, who long operated a buyers club for medical marijuana in New York City, went to prison in Nebraska in 2012 on a four-to-six year sentence for transporting 150 pounds of marijuana headed for New York along with two other people.

A note on the Yippie Museum’s Facebook page says: “Closed Until Further Notice.”