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HIPPIES

Birth of a Neighborhood

Today Dangerous Minds posts some 1967 footage (believed to be from the film “Last Summer Won’t Happen”) of the East Village, which had only recently come to be called that. Keep an eye open for a trio of underground and hippie bastions: The Peace Eye Bookstore at 147 Avenue A, the Digger Free Store at 264 East 10th Street, and Underground Uplift Unlimited (makers of the “Make Love Not War” buttons) at 28 St. Marks Place.


… And the Yippies on St. Marks

P5300082Jesse FishThe Yippie movement started in the basement of this building at 30 St. Marks Place.

“New York is naturally fantastic — especially where I live — just one gigantic happening,” wrote the young 1960’s political activist, Abbie Hoffman, while living on Avenue C and 11th Street. Hoffman, the counterculture, anti-war advocate had recently arrived in the city divorced, jobless and estranged from his family in Worcester, Mass. Feeling free and ambitious, Hoffman promptly set out to organize political and spiritual movements which he believed would change the warring Western world.

Hoffman, along with Jerry Rubin, went on to establish the Yippie — short for Youth International Party — political group while residing in a basement apartment at 30 St. Marks Place, until recently home to the Japanese restaurant Go. In Hoffman’s mind, the Yippies would be an answer to the hippie movement, which he believed was aimless and too drug-centered to accomplish any real change in United States policy.

Hoffman once affirmed that a “Yippie is a hippie who’s been beaten up by the cops,” and thought that the neighborhood was the perfect launching pad for his alternative faction. Abbie spoke of the East Village as “the real hip underground, the successor to Greenwich Village as the heartland of bohemianism.”
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