­­Weekend after weekend, Steve Fallon visited the bar at the corner of 11th and Washington streets in Hoboken hoping to track down its owner. But Maxwell’s Tavern was always closed.

It was the summer of 1978 and Fallon, a restaurateur and recent college graduate from Paterson, was scouting locations for his family’s latest enterprise, a bar and grill. In a city where it seemed there was a bar on every corner, he and his three siblings and stepbrother had narrowed their options to the dim tavern at 1039 Washington St., the namesake of the nearby Maxwell House coffee plant.

Four decades later, Maxwell's is a nationally recognized name in American underground music, having hosted Nirvana two years before “Smells Like Teen Spirit” propelled the band to superstardom, and fostering the careers of Jersey-bred legends like Yo La Tengo and the Feelies.

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Maxwell’s ― in its most celebrated incarnation ― ceased to exist in 2013, but its legacy and influence endure in the form of Jersey City venues like WFMU’s Monty Hall, which draws influential bands to an intimate black box theater in Jersey City, and White Eagle Hall, a restored historic building that plays host to national touring acts. It was Maxwell’s that proved a cultural hub could thrive on the Hudson’s left bank.

When Fallon found the building, it wasn’t much to look at. “It was basically a pool-and-drink place,” Fallon said, speaking by phone from Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, where he runs two gift shops. Paychecks could be cashed at the bar, and a glass of beer cost 25 cents. Female patrons were few and far between.

And it was open only four hours a day ― four non-consecutive hours, timed to coincide with the shift changes at the coffee plant, Fallon said.

“It was a workers’ bar,” said Alice Galmann, a lifelong Hoboken resident. “There was probably courser language than you wanted to hear.”

Fallon, his sister Catherine Jackson Fallon, his brother Michael and his brother-in-law Mario Mazzola bought Maxwell’s in the summer of 1978 for $67,000 ― an amount that Galmann, a real estate broker, said “couldn’t get you a closet” today.

Recollections of the precise opening date under the Fallons' management vary. In Fallon’s memory, it was July 14, 1978, while an article in New York Rocker places the date somewhere in August.

“We were still putting the door on the hinges and people barreled in,” Fallon said, “and that was the locals. They were overjoyed there was a place they could go without having to take the PATH train.”

At first, the idea was for the older siblings to run the restaurant, with Fallon taking care of the music.

“I was the social director of sorts,” he said.

His brother’s dreams of a family-style restaurant were in full swing those first months, with Fallon hiring a pianist and jazz quartets to play during brunch while making plans to convert the backroom into a proper venue.

That’s when he met Glenn Morrow, a Glen Ridge native who had moved around the corner in 1977. Morrow was in a group, simply called “a,” with Richard Barone, later of the Bongos, that made its live debut in Maxwell’s front room on Halloween night, 1978. It was the venue’s first alternative rock show. Morrow remembers the music shaking glasses off the bar. “It wasn’t empty, but it wasn’t full,” Morrow recalled. “Steve had an interesting way of building clientele. There were still Maxwell House factory workers, some teachers, some scattered music people. The gay crowd.”

“In the beginning, it was a little confusing what we were,” Fallon said. “We didn’t go into a major flux of making everything expensive, so it was accepted those people still came, but maybe they didn’t come as often.”

Maxwell’s close association with alternative rock has fed a lingering misconception that this was the bar’s sole focus. The reality was that the offerings in the early years were more eclectic. A patron who came in one night to see an edgier band like the Fleshtones might be out of place if he returned in punk regalia the following day. “It was pretty funny,” Fallon said. “He’d think he could wear his safety pin in there. Then he’d come in and it would be jazz brunch.”

Fallon also broke ground early on by hosting gay nights, which he called “tea parties,” on Mondays.

“That was always a big draw,” said Eileen Lynch, who moved to Hoboken from West New York in 1981. “There weren’t a lot of places in 1980 for gay people” outside New York City.

Lynch also recalls attending dance parties hosted by DJs who commanded the back room in its early years. “Most of the people I met in Maxwell’s either lived in Hoboken or in the New Jersey area,” she said. “I’m sure there were New Yorkers that went there, but I tend to think that was later on, as the bands got bigger.”

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Rearranging the furniture

It’s hard to imagine now, but in the days before the Fallons bought Maxwell’s, Hoboken ― all of 14 blocks long ― was a city of neighborhoods.

“You used to joke that every block had a mayor,” said Bob Foster, director of the Hoboken Historical Museum, who moved to Hoboken in the early 1980s. There were people who spent their days minding the street and knew the garbage pickup or street cleaning schedules.

Then there were the “pillow ladies” who sat perched at windows day and night. “You didn’t even know these ladies,” Foster said. “They would tell you that your wife just left and she was at the post office. There was a feeling people knew each other’s business, and you appreciated that.”

The story of Hoboken’s gentrification bucks the typical narrative in which young artists are priced out of a neighborhood, braving street crime for large, cheap lofts conducive to artists and musicians.

Hoboken saw its fair share of setbacks in the 1970s, but unlike Manhattan’s Lower East Side, populated by junkies and strewn with burned-out lots, Hoboken offered cheap rent, clean streets and safety.

“Once word got out, more people moved in,” said Debbie Culhane, a lifelong resident now in her 70s. Instead of assimilating, she added, “people came into Hoboken and wanted to change the furniture.”

She acknowledged that the first wave of newcomers did have a positive impact ― renovating derelict brownstones, for instance, and planting shade trees ― while keeping things “traditionally Hoboken.”

But by the 1980s, the pace of development had quickened, as condominium towers replaced a declining waterfront where factories closed one after another.

“All these taller buildings started coming up,” said Ira Kaplan of Yo La Tengo. Gentrification accelerated to the point that condominiums were being replaced with newer, larger ones, Kaplan said.

“Just when you thought there was nothing left to build,” he said, “they would tear down one of the buildings they built first.”

Maxwell’s place in the history of Hoboken’s gentrification is complicated. What seems clear is that, despite the popular narrative, it was not the disruptor that set the changes in motion; Hoboken had already changed significantly by the time Fallon arrived in 1978. But Maxwell’s helped to establish Hoboken as a destination for musicians and music fans, helping to cement a status that, in turn, fueled the pace of the city’s evolution. In 1995, Fallon sold his share of Maxwell’s to Todd Abramson, a longtime friend and talent booker at Maxwell’s who, like Fallon, was a connoisseur of 1960s garage rock. Abramson booked similar acts and studiously maintained the back room’s downhome feel, while his co-owner refashioned the restaurant as a brew pub.

In 2013, Abramson and his partner closed shop, deciding that the club was no longer sustainable, due in part to Hoboken’s notorious parking shortage. “People don’t want to put up with the [crap] to come out here,” Abramson, now the talent buyer at White Eagle Hall, told The Record at the time.

A year later, Peter Carr and partners purchased Maxwell’s and ran it for a time as a restaurant, eventually reopening the back room for a mixture of events, including comedy and open-mic nights. But the place had a decidedly different vibe than it had when Fallon and Abramson were in charge.

It shut its doors once again in February of this year, months before the 40th anniversary of its purchase for $67,000 by the Fallons.

The building at 1039 Washington St. remains on the market, as does the enclosed awning the Fallons added in 1978 and metal letters spelling “Maxwell’s Tavern.” It is currently listed at just under $1.2 million.