"I am here for kicking down the door if the door needs to be kicked down." Dedja was not the owner at the time, and the establishment is now under new ownership following a sale in October.PHILADELPHIA - "When you've been shut down, you get loud," Amber Hikes, executive director of Philadelphia's Office of LGBT Affairs, said to raucous applause at a crowded town hall meeting in the William Way LGBT Center in May. He said Imer Dedja was listed as the “person in charge” - typically a manager or operator - of Silence Dogood’s Tavern and Big Ass Slices in Old City, to which city inspectors last summer issued a 48-hour cease operations order following a handful of violations, including the discovery of mouse droppings and cockroaches.
Singer, who owns a frame shop and apartments in the building next to Boxers, said he filed a petition to intervene with the Liquor Control Board because the Dedjas have “a history of health code violations." Imer and Tim Dedja didn’t respond to requests for comment. Morrin said the agreement of sale was contingent on the liquor license’s transferring from Fluet and Hynds to Tim Dedja, but that process was delayed, largely due to Singer’s intervention, and “the deal basically fell apart." Citing “legal and confidentiality reasons,” Morrin declined to explain further why the agreement was terminated.
Morrin said Dedja had intended to continue to operate the business as a similar LGBTQ-friendly sports bar. They have been in the process of selling the Philadelphia location to local restaurant owner Imer Dedja and his son Tim, who own spots like the seafood restaurants the Boiling House in Cherry Hill and the Boiling Pot in Old City, according to William Morrin, a liquor law attorney representing Tim Dedja.Ī Philadelphia location no longer appears on the Boxers website, and employees said Tim Dedja had handled day-to-day operations for months. Owned by Bob Fluet and Robert Hynds, the chain has three locations in New York and has been described as the “gay Hooters.” Neither Fluet nor Hynds responded to requests for comment. “They have literally closed themselves,” Singer said, “and are trying to pin it on other people.”īoxers PHL opened in October 2014 at 13th and Walnut Streets, the first location outside New York City.
State records show the owners themselves put the liquor license in “safekeeping” status at the end of January, a pause they could undo at any time. He said that he tried to intervene in a liquor-license transfer out of concerns related to health-code violations and that his intervention isn’t what shuttered the bar. Singer, who’s owned a building next to Boxers and has had a presence in the neighborhood for years, said he’s not motivated by hate or homophobia. People were angry - it wasn’t the first bar in the Gayborhood to be shuttered - and some showed up at the bar Sunday for a fundraiser to support the 20 employees newly out of jobs. A Philadelphia gay bar posted a notice on Facebook last week that it was “officially closed due to hate.” The post was a photo of a flier that blamed its lack of a liquor license on a “well connected wealthy man" motivated by hate.Ĭomments poured in from customers and community members, who began looking into the man, real estate developer David Singer, who had no direct connection with the operations of Boxers PHL, an outpost of a chain of sports bars that serve an LGBTQ clientele.