Greenwich Village

AT THE YIPPIE MUSEUM, IT'S PARROTS AND FLANNEL

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.