Counter Culture | THE GREEN DRAGON, AAP'S UNDERGROUND HANGOUT, STILL ROARS

aT SOME POINT AFTER 1959, WHEN WHAT WAS THEN called the College of Architecture moved into the former home of the College of Engineering, the University put down an asphalt tile floor in Sibley Hall's basement café. The coffee shop's new student patrons--budding architects and artists, not practical-minded engineers--balked at the institutional look and, using material gathered from the recently demolished machine shops behind the building, laid a new brick floor over the tiles. Instead of hauling the bricks away, Architecture dean Thomas Mackesey wisely decided to let them be. They're still there. The Green Dragon, as the café was later dubbed, would go its own way.

Long before "sustainable" became a design buzzword, the Dragon was a showplace of recycled chic. In the late 1960s, students embellished the fluorescent light fixtures with a lattice of decorative tin cans and built tables from sheets of sidewalk slate balanced on sewer pipes. Art department chair James Owen Mahoney covered the walls with vaguely psychedelic murals inspired by a sixteenth-century geometry text, and the place was ready for business. "Where one week ago there were just a few lonely pieces of furniture sitting on a paint-spattered brick floor, today there is a café that sells everything from hot chocolate and cigarettes to pistachios and matzohs," the Daily Sun proclaimed on April 17, 1968.

With a name borrowed from a tavern in J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings trilogy, the era's essential undergraduate read (another campus eatery, Okenshields, is also a Tolkien homage), the Green Dragon's eccentric inventory reflected the interests of its student managers: macrobiotic snacks and drafting supplies shared shelf space with staples like coffee and cigarettes. "If you asked for something three times, they would get it on the menu," recalls city and regional planning professor Robert Schwarting '69, BCE '71, MCE '76, who returned to Sibley to teach in the 1980s and found the Dragon and its menu of "eccentric, hippie stuff" little changed from his student days.

Things are a bit more buttoned-down now. In 2002, Cornell Dining officially took over daily operations after the College of Architecture, Art, and Planning gave the Green Dragon away in its plan to regain financial stability and avoid realignment with the other colleges. The menu stabilized, the prices went up, and some students fumed. "There are some people who think we sold out, when the reality was, we just weren't making any money," says former manager Giselle Barone '06, who worked at the coffee shop both before and after the change. "If something broke, we couldn't just call the Cornell Dining fix-it guys.We screamed and cried a little until whatever it was stopped exploding. Now things are more organized."

Like the well-worn brick floor, the Dragon's contrarian spirit has endured, and though Sibleyites complain about the higher prices and less-quirky menu, they still dutifully line up every morning. "When it comes down to it, architects still need caffeine," Barone says. "I think they'd come to this café even if it were run by North Korea."

-- Marina Yoffe '07