For almost 42 years, the café’s basement performance space had offered a stage and support for jazz, theatre, and other offbeat and experimental artists, from the Afro-Latin Jazz Orchestra to Suzanne Vega to Eve Ensler’s Vagina Monologues. But the rent is now literally 77 times what it was in 1977, and proprietor Robin Hirsch says he just can’t afford that much. — The New York Times