So on Monday, when Maxwell’s co-owner and public face, Todd Abramson, announced that the club would close after 35 years, the grieving was accompanied by a general amazement that Maxwell’s had lasted this long — one of the last vestiges of the arty scene it fostered, the rest mostly pushed out of Hoboken by decades of breakneck development, Manhattanesque rents, an explosion of frattish bars and wave after wave of newcomers, few of them inclined to plunk down $8 to see a band called Prawn.

Business is still respectable, Mr. Abramson, 51, said on Wednesday night in the basement storage room that functions as his office as the Mountain Goats, a band led by a caustically literary songwriter whose big singalong hit goes “I hope you die / I hope we both die,” played to a packed house upstairs. But the future is not bright.

“It’s better to leave a year or two early than a year or two late,” said Mr. Abramson, who has co-owned or booked the club for most of the last 27 years. (Mr. Fallon left in the ’90s.) “If you think of Willie Mays playing outfield for the New York Mets — I didn’t want us to wind up like that.”

On top of the cultural shifts — in Hoboken, in metropolitan New York’s indie music scene (now based in Brooklyn, two rivers away from Hoboken), and in the music industry as a whole — a crucial factor in Maxwell’s closing is that most prosaic but, in Hoboken, intractable of urban hassles: parking, which has gotten exponentially worse as the city’s population has swelled to 50,000 today from 33,000 in 1990.