Chicago's Hideout To Begin Hiatus, Hopes To Reopen in 2023: Owners

CHICAGO – A popular Chicago bar will close for the foreseeable future as the owners of The Hideout “navigate a situation” involving allegations by a former employee over how he was treated while employed by the business.

In a social media post on Monday, Hideout owners Tim and Kate Huten and Jim Hichsliff said The Hideout will begin a hiatus on Nov. 7 and will remain closed at least for the remainder of the year.

The announcement comes after Hideout program director Mykele Deville wrote in a lengthy Instagram post that he experienced “trauma and pain” while working at the business.

“I realized that Hideout never had any intention to set me up to succeed, but only wanted to trade on my racial identity, and the trust and respect I’d built within the arts communities of Chicago,” Deville wrote in the post. “I now understand that once they realized hiring me meant actually evolving as a company, they just disposed of me and went right back to their old, comfortable systems.”

In the post, Deville said he was ecstatic when he was hired to the program director’s job, which is located in Chicago’s Bucktown neighborhood. He said that to his knowledge he was the first Black program director the bar and music venue had ever hired, which created “enormous pressure” to succeed and open doors to people who were historically excluded from the space, Deville wrote.

He said that leadership and ownership pushed back on most of his ideas and said in addition to booking shows at the venue, he was tasked with other tasks such as cleaning up the performance shows, checking COVID-19 vaccination cards, cleaning and maintaining the green room as well as other “time-consuming tasks.”

He said that the owners were “slow to respond” when the venue was vandalized with white supremacist symbols and had its power cut. He also said he was once spat by on a person he approached about the venue’s mask policy and said that “leadership did nothing to support me,” Deville wrote in the Instagram post.

He said that he felt an incessant sense of dread before work and experienced anxiety during and after work hours and said it carried over to his home life. Deville said he was fired for making a disparaging remark about the venue and leadership cited poor work performance. A former manager, he said, claimed Deville was holding the staff “emotionally hostage” by complaining about the work environment.

Deville said he was offered a minimal severance package, but that it was predicated on him signing an agreement that he would not disparage The Hideout after he left. He claims that although he was told his insurance would remain in place for a month after he was let go, he learned that it was canceled within a week of his dismissal after he attempted to get tested for COVID-19.

In their statement on Monday, Hideout owners said that the situation is not a storm they can weather as they have done in the past.

“We take the concerns voiced by Mykele Deville and others in the community very seriously” the statement reads. “We acknowledge the deep pain Mykele and others are feeling. We have met with our staff, and we are ready to put in the hard work, and hear the difficult truths that such change requires.

“We are committed to taking action as we work with a human resources organization with a focus on diversity, equity, and inclusion.”

It continued: “As part of (navigating) process, we will explore options to provide support to our employees. It is our sincere hope that we will be able to reopen in 2023, with new leadership, and a commitment to a healthy, supportive and respectful organizational culture.”