Published on April 16, 2026, at FOX31
More financial issues that had plagued the now-closed lesbian bar The Pearl are coming to light, as the city on Wednesday seized the bar’s building, which once housed the historic Mercury Cafe, for unpaid taxes.
Notices the city’s Treasury Department posted on the doors to the building at 2199 California Street show the owners of Pearl Divers LLC owe more than $56,000 for taxes, the majority of which were for sales tax brought in by the business.
“This personal property is in possession of the Manager of Finance, Ex-officio, Treasure, City and County of Denver, State of Colorado, by virtue of a distraint warrant issued for the collection of unpaid taxes,” states a tax seizure notice on the door.
The notice states the unpaid sales tax is for periods from June to July 2025 and from September 2025 to April 2026.
It’s unclear exactly how long the owners could have known about the incoming seizure, and a spokesperson for the city’s finance department said she was limited in what it could say but generally explained how seizures happen.
“What I can say is that the city does not take steps like this lightly,” Laura Swartz, communications director for the Department of Finance, said. “City staff repeatedly attempt to reach businesses by phone, mail, email, and in person before getting to this point.”
The Pearl had already shut down just days before the seizure after staff rallied to stop efforts to fundraise money to save the bar, citing multiple financial issues and a break from one of the co-owners.
It’s been a nonstop week of news coming out of Denver’s only lesbian bar, and one of less than 40 in existence across the country.
How The Pearl got here in just a week
Several of the bar’s owners had announced on Saturday that it would shut down at the end of the month due to hardships managing an old building and other financial problems. Hours later, a GoFundMe was posted on The Pearl’s now-shutdown Instagram account by an individual owner to try and save the bar.
The GoFundMe initially said the money would go to rent and payroll, which its had said was around $11,000 per week; the bar’s staff later said their paychecks had bounced just before the closure announcement.
After the GoFundMe raised more than $80,000 in just a day, an update on Sunday to the GoFundMe stated the funds would go toward “paying all of our back rent, as well as payroll for our staff and to push us slightly ahead to hopefully avoid getting into a hole again.”
It seemed like efforts to at least temporarily save the bar had worked, but just a couple days after that on Tuesday, the bar’s staff released a surprise statement saying they couldn’t trust the owner who had made the GoFundMe and that the donations would do anything to save the bar.
With the unpaid taxes, bounced employee paychecks, owed back rent, and any other unspecified costs the bar had before it closed, it doesn’t seem likely the GoFundMe would have made much of a difference to keeping the city’s only lesbian bar open, which staff cited in their statement.
The staff said they had all reported the GoFundMe as fraud and encouraged others to do the same to get their money back, and the owner who made the GoFundMe, Dom Garcia, later made her own statement saying they would refund the GoFundMe’s donation. A GoFundMe spokesperson confirmed this and said they still had control of the money while the refund processed.
The owners later Tuesday dissolved The Pearl’s LLC entirely, immediately shutting down the business.
