A Night at the D-Bar

Julia Friedlander

For the undergraduate population at Princeton, the social life and weekend debaucheries tend to gravitate towards the east of campus, where Prospect Street provides a variety of diversions from campus responsibilities that disappear, or are routinely ignored, at midnight on Thursdays, Saturdays, or any other time when tap calls. For campus graduate students, however, the somewhat elusive D-Bar, or Debasement Bar (do some refer to it as Da Basement? I wouldn’t be surprised), invites its customers to descend the stairs below the tower of the Old Graduate College, literally into the basement, and thanks to university sponsorship, consume a wide variety of drinks at very wallet-friendly prices.

I ventured out to the Graduate College to experience this student venue on its opening night of “the season,” where a rather widely publicized 70’s infused celebration was taking place. I was surprised to see a long line winding out from the entrance; it was only midnight and they had reached capacity, only letting partiers in as others came out looking rather disheveled and sweaty. Once inside, the meager lighting contrasted in a blinding manner with the “waiting area,” a fluorescently lit and brutally unembellished hallway, which tried vacantly to disguise the bar’s suburban rec-room aesthetic, complete with stained acoustic tile ceilings. This space was full of dancers feeling nostalgic for “Dancing Queen,” swaying aimlessly in little dance circles (we all are familiar with this as the middle school social predicament), spilling drinks on each other, lighting each other’s cigarettes, and screaming above the music and the general din to conduct conversation. Venturing through another door, one reaches the actual bar, where on this night, bartenders stood in afro wigs with large silver peace signs around their necks, proffering cocktails to those who were patient enough to wait in line for them. Behind the bar, neon lighting added a retro element that did not carry through elsewhere, and if you’d had a particularly memorable night worth of commemorating, t-shirts were available.

Experiencing the D-Bar comes hand in hand with musings over graduate student life from the perspective of the undergraduate, wondering how Princeton exists as a social entity for Masters and PhD students. Undoubtedly, the focus on Princeton as a social institution lies in the unaffiliated mansions we learn to call home, both for us as students and for everyone outside the campus community who inevitably ask what the eating clubs “really are” (standard answer: co-ed frats where you eat, too). For most undergrads, unlike at other Ivy League schools, the graduate population seems somewhat invisible, aside from preceptors, language instructors, and the figures in Café Vivan and Chancellor Green Café who look mysteriously older, but wear too much black and too much big jewelry to be young professors.

So who’s really at the D-Bar? The consensus seems to be that it seduces first years with a somewhat magnetic attraction, and also those who establish it as their social maypole. Lisa Cerami, a fourth year in the German Department who is currently working on her dissertation in Berlin, writes in an ironic and somewhat nostalgic tone: “My first year I went to the D-bar about four or five times a week, we waited impatiently for it to open, so starved for distraction. I tried to convince myself that it was a great place to hang out, that we were very lucky to have such an establishment, and the beer was very cheap. My second year, the only thing left over from the original hypothesis was ‘Well, the beer is really cheap’ and I went four or five times the whole year.” Graduate students need to find their place, and unfortunately there are not very many options. I experienced the first year madness myself in the courtyard right outside the entrance. The supposedly annual, (or so I was told … I remain skeptical) First Year Cartwheel Contest was taking place, and slightly intoxicated, or more than slightly intoxicated, participants clad in long sequined dresses were making an Olympic gymnastic effort to complete as many consecutive turns to make it over someone’s fur coat, which was lying at a distance on the lawn. I spoke with Andrew Kovacs, a Woodrow Wilson student, who was very enthusiastic, and wanted me and my friend to join in. We remained observers, but we did meet the official winner of the competition, a first year, Nick Holett (also at the Woodrow Wilson School) who did not permit me to refer to his department as Woody Woo, but was obviously on personal terms with Robertson Hall. (He declared that it must be called Woo, and only Woo.) Although he won the contest and seemed rather elated, he did refer to graduate student life at Princeton as a work in progress. After we spoke, he and Andrew, in the words of the former, went through the big gothic doors “back into the breach.”

The D-Bar is a place to sample many beverages, but not a place most people hold onto. Laurent Pueyo, a second year in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering explains: “This is the beginning of the year and most of the normal grad students still go there: the ones sticking to it in February are the real sketchy ones - or they belong to the Eurotrash category.”

As Pueyo explains, the D-Bar becomes a venue for a certain cast of characters and fringe personalities in the graduate community perhaps because, as its unabbreviated name implies, it consciously diverges from the mainstream atmosphere. Shlomo Sher, a second year in the Psychology Department appreciates this “debasement” for its very departure from Monday through Friday conduct: “What impresses me about the D-Bar is how it manages to sustain, unselfconsciously, an ambience which is authentic but radically different from the rest of the GC. Upstairs, life is humdrum, people are stressed and preoccupied, all is quiet. Downstairs, the music is loud, the atmospherics heavy, the people loosened. Grad students easily categorized as ‘grad students’ shift into other categories (or so it seems to a fellow grad student) – as if they were actors paid to maintain the D-Bar’s style. It certainly improves our quality of life.”

Is the D-Bar a place to recreate yourself? Does it remain original? These are all matters of opinion. Whereas Sher finds it remarkable that such a basement would be host to such intense partying, unique experiences, even a “parallel universe,” Cerami portrays the atmosphere of the D-Bar as an “inhospitable terrain”, an almost psychological phenomenon, but by no means considers the place to be dynamic: “…My favorite people were the seminarians, whose names I do not remember but faces I will never forget. It was always delightful to watch the philosophers build dangerously tall towers out of their empty "beast" cans … you could know when they had been there, their towers outlasted their presence. All in all, it is hard to spend a lot of time in a basement, any basement. The basement is somehow not really in the world, it is a place to waste time you can't see passing. I thought it was typical that they gave us a basement, where you hide the old letters and furniture you don't particularly like or want to confront.”

Consensus has it that the D-Bar possesses an illegitimate air: apparently that’s where the Princeton Eurotrash are, the theologians, the first years who don’t know better and perform cartwheels in the courtyard. It’s a weird place that defies particular characterization. Painful as it may be even to think about the parallels, the latter sounds a lot like what we might say about our eating clubs, which are also notoriously impossible to characterize to a non-Princetonian. Even though you can get Pabst Blue Ribbon for .75 cents at the D-Bar, that’s not nearly enough to bring about a change of my regular “street” weekend plans any time soon.