Back in the day, Bostonians used to stay up later, and what's now an obscure alley drew them in

What's now a little used alley across Tremont Street from Lagrange Street (so obscure the Google Street Views car has never been down it) was once an entrance to a nightclub that was part of a restaurant complex where Boston's elite would meet to greet and eat - and until 3 a.m., if you can imagine.

The Schneider brothers, Joseph and Max, opened Steuben's 114 Boylston St., in 1932, after emigrating from Vienna - by way of New York.

Their new place featured what was then Boston's longest soda bar. After Prohibition was repealed the next year, Steuben's became one of the first restaurants in the city to win a liquor license - they kept the bar, but changed the beverages offered at it.

Their space stretched to Van Rensselaer Place, an alley they shared with three theaters off Tremont Street.

Eventually, they expanded Steuben's to include five separate rooms, including Club Midnight - open until 3 a.m. - and the Cave, which opened in 1942. At first, the Cave described itself as "Boston's Gayest Night Spot - in the earlier sense of the word - but eventually it became "Boston's only authentic Latin-American room," featuring Jack Fisher's Latin Band and weekly "Cha-Cha-Cha Jamborees."

In addition to Van Rensselaer Place, patrons could also get their cha-cha-cha on via an entrance on Boylston Place.

Steuben's and the Cave continued on through the 1960s and the advent of the Combat Zone. Steuben's closed sometime between April, 1966, when it took out its last help-wanted ad in the Globe, and 1968, when the Boston Licensing Board - one of whose members was Dapper O'Neil - approved a license for a new place called the Sugar Shack.

On April 22, 1965, meanwhile, the city officially renamed Van Rensselaer Place as Allen's Alley to honor Cambridge native (but Boston Public Library regular) Fred Allen, who had a regular segment on his radio about life on Allen's Alley in a fictional small town.

In addition to Steuben's, Max Schneider also operated restaurants at Suffolk Downs and at a track in Lincoln, RI - where he died of a heart attack in 1975. Joseph died in 1986.

The Steuben's name lives on - in Denver, where Max and Joseph's grand-nephew, Josh Wolkon, runs a restaurant with that name in honor of "the center of the Boston dining and nightlife scene" his uncles created.

Nishan Bichajian took the photo of the Cave's entrance sometime between 1955 and 1959 as part of a five-year MIT project funded by the Rockefeller Foundation called Perceptual Form of the City, focused on urban planning, in particular how individuals navigate large cities (photo posted under this Creative Commons license).