Ever crave a spot in the heart of campus to kick back and enjoy a cold one?
You’re about 12 years too late.
A desolate post office is all that remains of what was once the University Union’s Campus Pub, where for 28 years students would relax and drink with classmates and professors. Once one of the most popular places on campus, the pub closed in 1998, a victim of a changing attitude toward drinking by the school’s administration fueled by a nationwide hike in the minimum drinking age.
‘The Campus Pub was a great hangout place, whether it was in the middle of the day for lunch, or on Thursday nights when it was six deep at the bar,’ said Paul Charles, who went to Binghamton from 1977 to 1981. ‘Thursday night was the big night at the pub.’
Head there now, and there’s a bleak silence: No lines for pitchers of Bud, just students queueing up to get packages.
But back in the pub’s heyday, music poured out of through wooden doors and into the halls of the Union. It could have been spun by a DJ over the throngs of students on a packed Thursday night or humming from the jukebox over the murmur of Tuesday-afternoon patrons, recalled Barbara Lagrassa, who was a Spanish major at BU from 1970 to 1974. Thick clouds of cigarette smoke obscured the dark wooden tables and chairs. Greasy bar food joined alcohol and the smoke to complete the trifecta of a perfect pub, alumni recalled.
The pub had all the traditional greasy food ‘ hamburgers, hot dogs, pizza, french fries and hot pretzels. Scott Solomons, a biology major while at Binghamton from 1980 to 1984, remembered those fries as ‘out of this world’ ‘ soft, thick and ‘just right for the starving student.’
‘The food was pretty decent,’ Charles said, ‘though anything compared to the dining hall food was gourmet. The dining halls left a lot to be desired back then.’
The staple of any pub, besides the camaraderie, is of course the booze.
‘The manager trained students in the art of bartending, though the majority of students ordered pitchers of Bud, lot and lots of pitchers of Bud,’ Charles said, but added that the bar was fully stocked and that some students would order simple mixed drinks like Gin and Tonic or Rum and Coke.
Beer was No. 1, Charles said, because it was ‘cheap and plentiful and a few pitchers got the job done.’
At the pub’s beginnings in 1970, on a Thursday or a Friday, every table would be full and the bar would be surrounded by students ordering another pitcher. Lagrassa, who worked as a computer programmer after graduation, reminisced that the goal of the night wasn’t a random hookup ‘ and even getting smashed wasn’t a priority, although that never goes out of fashion.
‘The great thing about the Pub was that it was a casual place where friends could go to meet, talk and have fun,’ Lagrassa said. ‘Not the typical phony bar scene.’
At brewery promotion nights, students could score banners, mugs and signs. There was a dart board, a pinball machine and two arcade games: Asteroids and a Pac Man machine in the corner which gave out free plays if banged the right way with a tallboy.
Solomons, who grew up in Massapequa Park, N.Y., recalled getting toasty while playing ‘quarters’ at the pub and then moving on to dorm parties afterwards.
‘Back then, the lounges (and sometimes the cafeterias) would be packed, and there were several kegs. Usually in at least one dorm,’ said Solomons, now a dentist in Sandy Hook, Conn.
THE GOOD OLD DAYS
The seed for the pub was planted on Dec. 7, 1967, when the governing council of what was then called SUNY-Binghamton decided to make the campus ‘wet’: For the first time since the school’s opening, alcoholic beverages would be allowed in dorm rooms and at campus functions.
Buoyed by that decision, the student government decided the campus needed a pub and began fundraising in 1970, calling the fund ‘Tavern on the Green.’ The students had raised several thousand dollars when the administration decided to open a pub of its own, in a spot where dead storage space and day lockers had been, said David Hagerbaumer, who arrived at BU in 1979 as assistant director in the campus activities office and is now director of campus life.
For the first 12 years of the pub’s existence, there was no stigma towards drinking for most of the campus: The drinking age was 18. Keg nights in the dorms and semiformal dances with full bars reflected the era’s acceptance of drinking, Charles said.
Driver’s licenses then didn’t have pictures ‘ New York in 1984 became the last state in the nation to use photos ‘ so even if you were underage, borrowing someone else’s ID to get into the pub wasn’t hard, said Lagrassa, who grew up in the Buffalo, NY suburb of Kenmore.
Charles, who grew up in Commack, Long Island, viewed the IDs from the other side of the bar. He worked at the pub starting in his sophomore year, starting as a bouncer ‘ like classmate Billy Baldwin ‘ and moving on to the food counter and finally working as a bartender. He remembers that faking an ID was as easy as taking White-Out and a typewriter to the paper licenses.
Most of the fake IDs worked, but Charles, now an accountant in Garden City, said he had fun trying to spot the fakes of the students who finished high school at age 16.
‘One time, a girl from my hometown tried to get in with someone else’s ID,’ he said. ‘I looked at her and said, ‘I know who you are and this is not you,’ and sent her away. I never had anyone give me a hard time.’
But things began to change in 1982: The drinking age was going up. In 1982, it went to 19 from 18, and three years later, to 21, where it stands now.
The national age-raise push came amid an aggressive national campaign by the advocacy group Mothers Against Drunk Driving, which lobbied Congress hard, said Barrett Seaman, author of ‘Binge: Campus Life in an Age of Disconnection and Excess,’ and president of the advocacy group Choose Responsibility, a nonprofit organization founded in 2007 that advocates the lowering of the drinking age.
‘They tried to solve a single problem by attacking all the students who had been drinking legally,’ Seaman said. That put some 75 percent of college students across the country underage and, Seaman said, ‘drove drinking off campus and underground.’
When people could drink at 18, it wasn’t uncommon for students and faculty to go out and continue class over a few beers; now, Seaman said, students don’t have anyone to teach them to drink responsibly, and instead ‘pregame’ with hard liquor before going out ‘ part of what Seaman called a ‘whole dysfunctional situation surrounding dangerous drinking.’
THE WAY OF THE DINOSAUR
The pub was officially closed by BU officials in May 1998 during then-President Lois B. DeFleur’s tenure, though it was reopened two or three times in the following year for promotional events.
James Koval, the longtime director of the University Union, said the pub closed because it was losing money, although he couldn’t say how much. Years after the change in the drinking age, the campus caterer Sodexo was concerned about its license to sell alcohol and was carding ‘pretty hard,’ Koval said.
In a 1998 letter to the student government, DeFleur announced the pub’s imminent demise. ‘Through the planning process, it was decided that the remodeled University Union would not have a dedicated space for the sole purpose of a Pub, but a multi-purpose space which could house the Pub as well as other functions,’ DeFleur wrote. ‘[B]ased on information of actual student usage we know that not enough students patronize the pub to make it cost or space efficient to have a dedicated space solely for this purpose.’
Low attendance forced the pub to close some days, Koval said.
But some alumni, like Scott Olivenbaum ’00, a former Pipe Dream sports editor, didn’t buy the argument that the pub was being closed because it lacked patrons.
‘ [P]lenty of students and faculty still frequented the Pub ‘ I went there; I wasn’t allowed to drink but just hung out with professors as well as friends,’ Olivenbaum said. Attendance may not have been what it was in the ’70s or the ’80s, he said, but ‘by no means was there a lack of people coming through the old wood doors.’
Seth Mates ’00, an English major and former Pipe Dreamer, was also a regular at the pub. ‘I was under 21 every time I ever went to the pub, and I didn’t care that I couldn’t drink ‘ I’d eat a slice of pizza and just enjoy some R&R,’ Mates said.
Mates could think of another reason for closing the pub. ‘It was a PR move, plain and simple, to eliminate the potential liability of a place in the middle of campus where students could get loaded,’ he said, especially in light of DeFleur’s move to turn Binghamton into a Division I basketball school. ‘And as much as it sucked for us, it made a lot of sense for them to do it.’
Whatever the reason, the day the pub closed was one of mourning for students. The lamentations were captured in the May 8, 1998 edition of Pipe Dream.
‘Farewell, friend,’ lamented the edition’s front-page headline. The accompanying story reported that ‘hundreds of students swarmed the Campus Pub for one last beer.’
Junior Jon Mintzer declared himself nostalgic. ‘It feels like the last episode of ‘Cheers’,’ he told the paper.
‘On the last night some may have cried and some may have forgotten. On the last night of the last call a cup was raised ‘to the Pub’ and [things] will never be the same,’ junior Eric Winders wrote on the issue’s opinion page. Junior Kevin Jackson told Pipe Dream, ‘I’m gonna have to start drinking in my room on the chem-free floor.’
Twelve years later, alumni reflected on the day.
‘When I heard the Pub had closed, it made me sad and made me feel bad for the students who would be missing out,’ Lagrassa said.
‘In the end, it was only the cherry on top of the nasty sundae of inconvenient, uncomfortable change my generation had to go through during our college careers,’ Olivenbaum said.
Mates helped organize one of the last events at the pub at which booze was served: the campus radio station WHRW’s 24-hour Radiothon, on Feb. 3, 1999.
‘I think we had about 50 cases of beer and we were out before the pub closed that night,’ Mates said.
The pub’s chairs and tables have since been relocated to the Undergrounds Coffehouse, a space in the bowels of the Old Union where there no alcohol is served. Hagerbaumer said the university is searching for the old bar from the pub to place in the coffee house. He said it was probably lost in storage somewhere.
With the Campus Pub long closed, students nowadays head downtown on a Thursday night; others hide cases of beer in their refrigerator from their resident assistant. On an average weekend evening, some visit the Undergrounds. Miles off campus many more mob the downtown bars night after night.