From http://archive.guidemag.com
Steps away from Park Square, in Bay Village, gay patrons poured into Mario’s, a restaurant with an upstairs bar; Jacques, a drag venue that still exists; Cavana’s, a boisterous women’s bar; and, in a former speakeasy space, the more formal Napoleon Club. Not far away, straddling the block between Providence and Boylston Streets, was a 24-hour Hayes Bickford Cafeteria known to its regulars as “the Gay Hayes.”
A short distance from Mario’s was the Punch Bowl, Boston’s foremost gay bar from World War II to Stonewall. Joseph McGrath, Prescott Townsend’s secretary during the ’60s, remembers pub crawls that would begin near South Station, continue through Playland and Twelve Carver, and “always wind up at the Punch Bowl.” The two-level operation had a dance floor in the basement. Like other pre-Stonewall nightspots, it was subject to police harassment, but whenever Boston’s finest came through the front door, upstairs staff would flash a signal light warning dancers below to switch to partners of the opposite sex. The Punch Bowl’s employees included a waitress known as “Tex,” who became a den mother to Boston’s gay male community, and Sidney Sushman, who later earned infamy as drag diva Sylvia Sidney. The bar figures prominently in reminiscences collected by Boston’s GLBT History Project.
I NEVER WENT THERE OR AT LEAST I DON’T THINK I DID.