Report: Brooklyn Mirage Execs Privately Cancelled 2025 Season, Continued to Sell Tickets Anyway

By Scott Enman

This summer, the sign outside of 140 Stewart Avenue, former residence of the now shuttered and somewhat disassembled Brooklyn Mirage, will have a new name. But even with Pacha moving in and aiming for a June opening, there are, somehow, still new details surfacing from the long, strange fall of the building’s previous tenants.  

Internal documents reviewed by Brooklyn Magazine reveal that top brass at Mirage internally cancelled the 2025 season on June 27, yet continued to sell tickets for shows at the venue that they knew would not happen, all while generating short-term liquidity from those sales. According to those documents, Mirage executives paused a third-party peer review—required by the city to assess the venue and make sure the structural design is up to code—of its costly expansion as early as June 15. 

“Nothing was physically done to the venue,” said one former executive from Avant Gardner’s headquarters. “It just sat there for months like a ghost,” added a lead designer on the project. 

A Department of Buildings spokesperson confirmed that, indeed, between April 29, 2025 (days before the initial May 1 opening date was derailed by a failure to pass a safety inspection) and August 21, 2025, there was no meaningful attempt to fix the $30 million project, citing “several months of inactivity from the property owners and no evidence of progress.”

On August 21, with no substantial alterations made to the venue, DOB reps actually ordered Avant Gardner to either properly stabilize the structure to bring it up to code or demolish it in its entirety. The Mirage’s owners ultimately chose to tear it down, with demolition currently underway. 

All the while, partygoers continued to purchase tickets and plan expensive trips and vacations surrounding shows listed at the Mirage on Avant Gardner’s website. Brooklyn Mirage had sold over 214,000 tickets for the 2025 season through April 30, for a total of roughly $16.6 million, according to records reviewed by BKMAG. As of August 4, when Avant Gardner filed for bankruptcy, court filings show that at least 90,000 people still held tickets for upcoming events at the Mirage, and thousands more were owed refunds for past shows.

The writing was on the wall before the venue officially cancelled the 2025 season on June 27, 2025. Jonathan Mammele, the lead construction manager and technical coordinator for the project, told BKMAG that his team received “pencils down” orders around June 13, 2025. 

“Activity on the project dropped off abruptly in the days that followed,” he said. 

Former execs also claim Andrew Axelrod, CEO of longtime Mirage backer Axar Capital Management, and Gary Richards, the appointed CEO of Avant Gardner, were already discussing Chapter 11 bankruptcy as a viable option for the company in May 2025, right around when Josh Wyatt was fired as AG’s top dog. On June 23, the company briefly considered building a temporary structure on the adjacent Varick Street lot for the remainder of the season for roughly $9 million, but those plans were abandoned shortly after due to it being “costly” and “logistically challenging” to accomplish within their desired timeframe. 

And so the season was officially cancelled internally four days later. Tickets continued to be sold externally, however, for shows left on the calendar and with no direct communication to ticketholders about schedule changes, relying instead on brands, talent, and ticketing apps to get the news out. 

Avant Gardner went silent after cancelling its Memorial Day weekend programming on May 20, making no further statements until its bankruptcy announcement in August. Senior executives recall a particularly contentious and uncomfortable call in early May with “a lot of yelling” between Wyatt and Richards, openly fighting over the company’s communication strategy. Wyatt reportedly pushed for more transparency with fans, while Richards insisted on less being more.   

“Axar basically switched out all the PR,” the executive said. “They fired the PR firm, they took their own PR, they went silent on everything. They basically stopped any type of attempt to get the permits, and at that point, I knew they were going to file for bankruptcy.”