The Grad House: The best-kept secret on campus

The Grad House is known to students, professors and loved ones in the Fredericton community. (Credit: Jennifer William)

Before it was a bar, it was a home. Before it was a home, it belonged to a poet.

676 Windsor Street has been many things: a writer’s residence, a research centre and Windsor Castle. Today, most people just call it the “Grad House.” But whatever name you give it, the feeling inside stays the same, as if you’ve stumbled into somewhere you’re allowed to just be.

Alden Nowlan lived here first. He was a New Brunswick poet and writer-in-residence at the University of New Brunswick from 1968 to 1983. 

Matte Robinson, chair of STU’s English department, has been coming here since he was a graduate student himself, back when the space formally opened in 2003 and entry required signing in non-grad-student friends at the door.

“I used to joke that this place used to belong to Alden Nowlan, who had very famous literary soirees here,” Robinson said, glancing around the room. “Now that it’s a bar, there’s a lot less drinking going on.”

When Nowlan passed away, his wife, Claudine Orser, made the house available to graduate students, a deliberate extension of what it had always been: a place for conversation, camaraderie and ideas. 

The renovations that converted it into the Graduate Student Association’s home and bar were completed in October 2003. According to Krista Harris, executive director of the Grad House, the spirit never really changed.

Harris has worked at the Grad House for fifteen years, starting behind the bar at the Alden Nowlan House before working her way up. She knows this place just the way anyone would remember their childhood home. 

“I feel enriched by the people I get to interact with every day,” she said. “Even if it’s just making eye contact or asking someone how they're doing, all the way up to major problem solving.”

The crowd here doesn’t sort neatly. There are grad students, undergrads, STU and UNB professors and poets. 

Kerstyn Dobbs, a biology PhD student, has bartended at the Grad House for four years. She watches the room shift across a single day, morning students bent over laptops, coffee cups going cold and then by late afternoon, something looser. Professors filter in around 4:30, the energy unwinding.

“If you’re going to the library, you’re going to study,” Dobbs said. “You’re not getting to know each other in that setting. But here, I know a lot of people meet people … they become friends. That's not something you necessarily get anywhere else.”

As an Earth sciences researcher, Robinson agrees. Over shared coffee and drinks at a wooden table, unexpected friendships have sprouted. A common ground between English and Geology.

“This is one of the few places on campus where you can expect to go in and have an intellectual discussion about just about everything,” said Robinson. “It’s one of those spaces you really need to have on a campus.”

According to Harris, spaces like this are shrinking across campuses and across the country. After the pandemic shuttered the Grad House for months, reopening felt different. The instinct to gather had to be relearned. They started serving coffee as a practical decision, but also as an invitation.

“If you build it, they will come,” Harris said, quoting her brother’s favourite movie. “We thought: if we get really good coffee here, we’ll have a really good community here.”

The coffee is roasted by Ron Whitney, a longtime Fredericton resident who sources beans from cooperatives around the world.

However, what the Grad House offers, really, is permission. Permission to sit without an agenda. To talk to a stranger. To be a grad student studying asphalt and end up at the same table as an English professor.

“You learn something every day from somebody you meet,” said Harris, “because somebody’s studying something different all the time.”

Orientation is her favourite time of year. She said she loves watching people arrive fresh off days of travel, not yet knowing a soul and find their way to a table. Suddenly, an afternoon that doesn’t feel quite so lonely.

When asked what would be lost if the Grad House closed tomorrow, Dobbs didn’t hesitate.

“The community,” she said. “It would be very devastating to everyone who frequents here every day.”

For Robinson, it’s about the campus spaces that exist outside of structured department meetings and lecture halls. Places where the agenda is just people and not a community.

“Campuses are supposed to be, more than anything else, places where scholars can sit and talk,” he said. “Outside of a strictly business space.”

Outside the window, Windsor Street carries on. Inside, someone is working, another person is laughing and the rest are meeting people they didn’t know an hour ago.

The best-kept secret on campus is hiding in plain sight.