Graduate Center Bar (GCB)

The story

The GCB opened in 1969, the year Brown unveiled its Graduate Center — a four-story slab flanked by brutalist dorm towers on College Hill. It was nicknamed the Jelly Bean Lounge for its late-'60s furniture. In 1972 Rhode Island dropped the drinking age to 18 and the room filled; by the time the bar moved down into its current basement in 1986 the age was back to 21, narrowing the crowd to upperclassmen, graduate students, alumni, faculty and staff.

It is not a Brown bar. The GCB is a nonprofit private club that leases the space from the university and answers to its own board of students and faculty, and its Class D liquor license forbids it from advertising — which is most of why nobody can find it. Membership runs $35 for the school year; the Graduate Student Council buys it in bulk for every grad student. Names and signatures go into a spiral notebook by the door. Susan Yund, whose father taught at Brown, has managed the place for more than thirty years; Patrick Cull and John Johnson have been head bartenders for fifteen and seventeen.

Getting in means a steep tree-shaded ramp that dead-ends at three dumpsters, an unmarked steel door, a cinderblock passage and a red velvet rope. Past that: black drop ceiling, terra-cotta tile, bluish-purple walls, blue dorm-room string lights, a disco ball, chandeliers made from old beer taps, and a bust of Elvis in a lei — plus real art, including work by painter Bill Franz and the Mad Peck. Side rooms hold two pool tables, an inlaid backgammon table with a cabinet of board games, darts and chess. The list, hand-lettered in neon marker above the bar, runs to roughly fifty beers, wines, sakes and aperitifs plus two dozen cocktails at $6 to $13 — a program Yund had the two of them rebuild during the twenty-month pandemic closure.