The sign still reads “Bizarre” and the first two vowels are still flipped quixotically, but the gate has remained shut since early June. The bartenders have filed suit.

“I don’t know how they’ve been able to get away with it, but they never paid their employees,” one bartender told Bushwick Daily wishing to stay anonymous. They had joined five other coworkers in a lawsuit, filed in federal court earlier in August, demanding over $100,000 in unpaid wages. “The owners made it a living hell to work there,” they said.

The bar had been the project of Greg Babeau and Jean-Stéphane Sauvaire, a French filmmaker whose latest movie, A Prayer Before Dawn played Cannes in 2017 and starred Joe Cole, a minor player in “Peaky Blinders.” Sauvaire, per a write-up in the New York Times in 2013, discovered the bar by accident. After squatting in a “dilapidated mansion” that he had hoped to use as a location for a Jean Cocteau adaptation that never came off the ground, he ended up living upstairs and eventually got around to buying it from its owner.