9 Bleecker St. is for sale — and rent

There are dueling realtor signs at 9 Bleecker St. just west of the Bowery. 

First, there was a listing to buy the building via Corcoran for $6.6 million.

More recently, the space showed up for lease via RealNY... the floors are available for retail or office space...

This past Nov. 7, after 10 years at No. 9, Overthrow closed its boxing gym on the ground floor. As ownership wrote on Instagram: "Unfortunately, we took on immense debt during and post-Covid, which kept the doors open, but we can no longer afford our current lease, and the building has been listed for sale by the owner, making staying open unsustainable." 

This one-time home (41 years) of the Yippies, named and created by Abbie Hoffman and Paul Krassner, ended in January 2014 after a protracted legal battle. (Read this archived story in the Times for all the legal wrangling and history.) 

Overthrow was named after one of the countercultural newspapers that the Yippies published here.

RIP Paul Krassner

Paul Krassner, who "epitomized a strain of anarchic 1960s activism," per the Times, died yesterday at his home in Desert Hot Springs, Calif. A cause of death was not revealed by his family. He was 87.

The Brooklyn native, the founder The Realist, one of the earliest underground humor magazines, had deep roots in the East Village.

From his obituary in the Times today:

Encouraged by [Lenny] Bruce, Mr. Krassner often took to the stage, delivering comic monologues at nightclubs like the Village Gate. He and his East Village friends also dreamed up pieces of public tomfoolery.

In one, in 1968, a group of 60 hippies chose to turn the tables on tourists streaming into the East Village to gape at its scruffy, longhaired denizens. With cameras dangling from their necks, the hippies hired a Greyhound bus for a sightseeing tour of the tidy middle-class neighborhoods of Queens.

In 1967, Mr. Krassner, [Abbie] Hoffman and friends formed an organization to meld hippies and earnest political types. Mr. Krassner dreamed up the name Youth International Party — Yippie for short.

And from the Associated Press:

An advocate of unmitigated free speech, recreational drug use and personal pornography, Krassner’s books included such titles as “Pot Stories For The Soul” and “Psychedelic Trips for the Mind,” and he claimed to have taken LSD with numerous celebrities, including comedian Groucho Marx, LSD guru Timothy Leary and author Ken Kesey.

Check out a few highlights from his long, active life over at Boing Boing.

Previously on EV Grieve:
Last day for the Yippies at No. 9 — for now