The death toll is sounding for some of downtown Manhattan’s most familiar and respected clubs. Tonic, the avant-jazz club on Norfolk Street, is staging benefit concerts to raise enough money to stave off eviction. The Ludlow Street building occupied for 10 years by Luna Lounge is being torn down to make way for luxury condominiums. Fez, the music and burlesque club on Lafayette Street, will close its doors forever later this month after 13 years of operation. Even CBGB is fighting for its life in court. The reason, in every case, is a familiar one: rising rents and changing neighborhoods.

Whenever clubs are priced out of neighborhoods, the reaction is the same: hand wringing and grumbling about greedy landlords and status-seeking bridge-and-tunnel hordes. But the truth is, by the time a club is forced to abandon its old digs, it’s most vital and musically important days are often behind it.

CBGB has been insulated from the skyrocketing real estate prices on the Bowery for years, thanks to a sweetheart deal from the Bowery Residents’ Committee, the nonprofit group that holds the lease to the building and runs a homeless shelter upstairs. But the group’s new management wants market value for the space, which would double the club’s rent from just over $19,000 a month to almost $40,000.”I can’t afford to pay $20,000 more,” said CBGB’s owner, Hilly Kristal. “I can’t afford to pay $15,000.”

Luna Lounge owner Rob Sacher hopes to relocate elsewhere in the neighborhood or move to Williamsburg. Tonic may also consider cheaper locales in the city. If CBGB were forced to move, Mr. Kristal says it could end up as far away as New Jersey, Florida, L.A., or even – dare we say it – Vegas? “In Las Vegas, they think the mayors there would love to have me in the downtown area, and give me support, and probably pay for it all,” said Mr. Kristal.

But the truth is CBGB, as it exists today, wouldn’t seem that out of place on the Strip. Since it’s heyday in the mid-1970s, the club has become a kind of punk-rock version of the Hard Rock Cafe, doing a brisk business in T-shirts and merchandise (including baby clothes). “People come in all day long just to look at the place,” says Kristal. “It’s not a tourist trap, but people come here and they look around. I should start a museum.” Our nostalgia for clubs like CBGB is misplaced: It’s not the clubs themselves we miss, it’s the cultures they represent. The art-rock scene that made CBGB famous has long since left the building. But the same vibrant music culture that made New York City the birthplace of Bob Dylan, the Velvet Underground, the Ramones, and, more recently, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, can still be found here-only now it’s in Williamsburg, and further out in the outer boroughs.

The real estate inflation that drives clubs out of neighborhoods is often something they help to set in motion. Live music venues, particularly those that cater to cutting-edge or fringe music, have long been the city’s homesteaders, populating and invigorating squalid neighborhoods and preparing the way for the gentrification shock troops: the restaurants, art dealers, and developers that send a neighborhood’s rental prices skyward. “Like other nightlife, there’s a long history of music clubs or dance clubs going into neighborhoods before they’re gentrified,” said a lawyer for the New York Nightlife Association, Robert Bookman. “And then, of course, nightlife gets pushed out.”

“The neighborhood has changed immensely,” said Melissa Caruso Scott, who opened Tonic with her husband seven years ago on the Lower East Side. “When we got here there was mostly just rats on the block, and now Schiller’s is on the block. I would like to think we’ve helped it along. We’ve certainly made this block more appealing.”

But for a club like Tonic, it is difficult to keep up with the changing fortunes of the neighborhood. The club has seen its rent double since it opened seven years ago, and faces only more of the same. The chairman of the retail leasing and sales division for Prudential Douglas Elliman, Faith Hope Consolo, said that East Village space that rented for $10 to $18 a square foot 25 years ago was going for twice that five years ago, and now rents for around $75 a square foot. Within the year, she expects that figure to top $100. That’s a 100% increase in just over five years. The Lower East Side, she said, is only lagging about 10% behind.

As the neighborhood has continued to change, Ms. Scott’s delight has given way to worry. “I would hate to see the Lower East Side become one giant apartment complex. You never hear about an apartment building closing,” she said. “There’s been a lot of clubs and restaurants and cultural spots closing to make way for condominiums.”

The tiny stretch of land from Greenwich Village to the East River is arguably the most influential musical real estate of the last 40 years. Consider this partial list of the music it has yielded: Bob Dylan and the urban folk revival; seminal pre-punk bands such as the Velvet Underground, Suicide, and the New York Dolls; the CBGB roster of Television, the Ramones, Blondie, and the Talking Heads; and the new wave and no wave movements of the late 1970s/early 1980s.

Individual clubs play a prominent role in this history. Greenwich Village hotspots like Cafe Wha? and Figaro helped to incubate the urban folk revival in the early 1960s. But, while they both still sit at their original locations, neither contributes anything meaningful to contemporary music. Clubs are a necessary, but by no means sufficient condition for the development of a vibrant music scene. Rents – commercial and residential – are also a key factor.

In the Village of the late 1950s and early 1960s, the rampant youth culture and bohemianism – both outgrowths of cheap living quarters – are what made the scene possible. Bob Dylan rented his first Village apartment, a one-room railroad flat on West 4th Street, for $80 a month. But this hand-to-mouth, artistic element is driven out of a neighborhood by rising costs long before the clubs are forced to go.

CBGB likewise benefited from being at the right place at the right time. In fact, it probably owes its fame to the very forces troubling it today. Before he opened on the Bowery, Mr. Kristal ran a club called Hilly’s on 13th Street. He was forced out, along with other area clubs, in 1972, when the neighborhood changed. “The people on the street – there was a judge and a state senator – they didn’t want us there,” he said. “We all essentially had to move, and now for years there’s no entertainment on the street.”

As the name suggests, Mr. Kristal had intended CBGB on the Bowery to be a country, bluegrass, and blues venue when he opened it in 1973. It was only when members of the band Television stopped by and asked to play – lying and saying that they performed music in keeping with the club’s name – that CBGB, as we know it, was born.

But just as it did in the Village, the cutting-edge culture surrounding CBGB has moved on. The Televisions of today are no longer walking the Bowery looking for a place to play. If the club closes, what we’ll remember is neither the CBGB Mr. Kristal opened in 1973, nor the one that exists today, but a version that existed for a glimmering moment in between – a club created by a unique confluence of talent, community, and affordable open space.

As Manhattan’s neighborhoods have gentrified, one after the other eastward, the elements that produced the great scenes of the 1960s through the 1980s jumped the river, taking root in Williamsburg. First came the artists, early in the 1980s, attracted by the dirt-cheap studio and warehouse spaces. Musicians, labels, and clubs followed closely behind.

Here again, the combination produced a musical flowering, this time in the form of retro rock, electroclash, and post-punk – sounds that have reshaped the music underground far beyond New York City in the last few years. Bands such as the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, the Rapture, the Liars, and Radio 4 have established Williamsburg among New York City’s great historic music scenes.

But even in Williamsburg, the real estate market is wreaking havoc, and prices are increasing at a rate that far outpaces the historical transformations in the East Village and LES. According to David Maundrell, a Williamsburg broker with Aptsandlofts.com, commercial real-estate that rented for $7 or $8 a square foot in the late 1980s now goes for somewhere in the neighborhood of $40 to $45 a square foot.

Existing clubs are already feeling the heat. “Our rent has at least doubled; it will double again when we renew in five years,” said the director of Galapagos, a mixed-art-and-music space that opened in Williamsburg in 1998, Robert Elmes. “At a certain point you’re not doing culture programming, you’re doing survival programming.”

Mr. Maundrell advises would-be club owners today to look past downtown Williamsburg, out the L line to the Morgan Avenue stop and beyond, where commercial space still rents for around $12 a square foot. “They need services. They’d love a place like Northsix out there,” he said. “It’s the place where the big-money developers have not gone yet because it’s not that glamorous.”

In neighborhoods like East Williamsburg, Bed-Stuy, Greenpoint, Red Hook, Bushwick, and Long Island City, new venues and scenes are already emerging. The Hook, a live-music venue that hosts acts ranging from Norah Jones to death-metal bands and day-time concerts for kids, opened 20 months ago in the Red Hook area of Brooklyn. Club manager Jeffrey Goldin will only describe the rent as “very very reasonable.”

“Hopefully we’ll be a cornerstone in the neighborhood,” said Mr. Goldin. “People think it’s very far away, especially the Manhattan crowd, because there’s no train. We knew we were opening up a little early for the neighborhood. We knew we were ahead of our time.”

Far from resenting visitors from Manhattan, the Hook views itself as a beacon and informal tourism bureau for the neighborhood. It offers shuttle service from nearby subway stops for weekend concerts and promises a free drink to anyone who shows a taxi receipt. “We’re helping bring awareness to Red Hook, helping people to know where the neighborhood is,” said Mr. Goldin.

In areas of East Williamsburg, Greenpoint, and Bushwick, where formal clubs are still somewhat scarce, a flourishing living-room scene has grown up to fill the void. Tiny makeshift spaces – usually converted lofts or basements with cutesy names like Jane Doe Books, the Woodser, Vagina Beach, and Fort Awesome – promote shows through e-mail lists and flyers. They pay musicians by passing a hat, and concertgoers and performers all crash together on the floor after a show.

“The really great thing about putting on a show in your living room is the community that comes out of it,” writes Thera Webb via e-mail. Ms. Webb, 24, lived and organized concerts at Jane Doe Books, a “feminist lending library/punk house” in Bushwick, before going back to school. “Sometimes you’ll walk into the kitchen and the headlining band will be making beans and rice for the whole audience,” she recalled.

The tight-knit, isolated scene she describes sounds a bit like the Greenwich Village and Bowery of old. That is, it sounds like New York City.

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Following the Music

The club scene both in Manhattan and the outer boroughs is constantly in flux. Bands play in bars, ballrooms, art spaces, even living rooms. The following is just a sampling of brave souls defying the odds – and the G train – to keep making music.

The Hook
18 Commerce Street, Red Hook, 718-797-3007
www.thehookmusic.com
A 400-person space with a semicircular brick-and-wood bar, and a carriage house converted into a green room for bands. Lots of safe parking and free barbecues in the backyard.
HOW TO GET THERE: The B61 bus stops a block away, and the Carroll Street F stop is a 10-minute walk.

Sputnik
262 Taaffe Place, Clinton Hill, 718-398-6666
www.barsputnik.com
Relaxed, roomy, retro-futuristic space with live music, DJs, and art shows. A daytime menu includes Greek-American sandwiches and finger foods, which no doubt are smeared throughout the copies of Kant, Chomsky, and Nabokov available for perusal in the tiny library.
HOW TO GET THERE: G Train to Classon Avenue, 38 or 48 buses to De Kalb and Classon.

Tommy’s Tavern
1041 Manhattan Avenue, Greenpoint, 718-383-9699
www.tommystavern.com
Tommy’s Tavern isn’t new, but it is newly discovered by Greenpoint scenesters, who now book shows a couple nights a week. Working-class locals and tattooed bohos enjoy $2 PBR and Bud, while listening to local faves like Japanther and undiscovered touring acts.
HOW TO GET THERE: G Train to Greenpoint Avenue.

Europa Club
98-104 Meserole Avenue, Greenpoint, 718-383-5723
www.europaclub.com
Nestled in the heart of a Polish neighborhood, the spacious dance floor and 1980s laser lights give this Greenpoint club a distinctly euro-dance flavor. Hosts live art-rock and jazz, and DJs spinning various styles.
HOW TO GET THERE: G Train to Nassau Avenue

Llano Estacado
Metropolitan Avenue at Rivers Street, Williamsburg. No phone
www.toddpnyc.com
Organized by tireless Williamsburg promoter Todd P., Llano Estacado is a windowless, two-level club near the river. The main venue is in the basement, and a second, smaller stage and rotating art-hanging space are housed on the top floor. The bathroom is already notorious. Lineups include touring indie acts, pre-buzz local bands, and arty outfits like the Animal Collective.
HOW TO GET THERE: L to Bedford, walk west on Metropolitan Avenue to Rivers Street.

The Delancey
168 Delancey Street, Manhattan, at the foot of the Williamsburg Bridge, 212-254-9920
www.thedelanceycom
Staking out one of the few fringe locations still available on the island, this three-story club is the new hipster find. Features sexy-sleazy live rock, death disco, and celebrity DJs from local bands showing off their record collections. Also a favorite after-party spot for bands playing larger venues.
HOW TO GET THERE: J Train to Essex, or the F to Delancey and walk east.