Napoleon Club (site)

The Napoleon Club opened at 52 Piedmont Street in Boston's Bay Village in September 1952 as a private members-only gay men's club, in the pre-Stonewall era when public gay bars were subject to routine police raids and a members-only structure gave patrons legal cover. It operated for 46 years, until January 1998 — the longest run of any private gay members' club in the northeastern US. The interior was famously formal — chandeliered piano bar on the ground floor, a small dining room and library on the second, private rooms on the upper two — and the club's reputation was built on exactly the kind of discreet, cross-class, professional-and-artist mixing that public bars couldn't provide until well into the 1980s. Regulars over the decades included Leonard Bernstein, Truman Capote (when in town), and hundreds of Boston-area physicians, academics and lawyers whose participation depended on the members-only closure. The club's founder, Ralph Cimeno, ran it for its first 25 years; the second owner, John Perreault, ran it from 1977 to 1998. Cimeno died in 1988; Perreault sold the building in 1998 as membership dwindled with the arrival of open gay bars in the South End. Napoleon Club closed on 27 January 1998 after 46 years. The Piedmont Street townhouse has been through several conversions since; the current use is private residential. A History Project marker was installed on the façade in 2020. Exterior view only, 24/7 from Piedmont Street. Bay Village is a small, wedge-shaped neighbourhood tucked between the South End and the Theatre District; Boylston Green Line is five minutes' walk.