Frederick William Irving Lundy was an interesting transitional character in Brooklyn's history who deserves a page of his own. By birth he was Old Brooklyn. His grandfather, also named Frederick, was brought to Brooklyn in 1838 as a 14-year-old orphan by the Van Nostrand family whose roots went back to New Amsterdam. While the Lundy family later suspected they might be of Dutch and English origin, Frederick came to the US from Bremerhaven, Germany, which at the time of his birth was not yet a major port but an assemblage of small fishing villages scattered on the mudflats and islands near the mouth of the Weser River on the North Sea.
When the first Frederick Lundy started a fish business, Brighton Beach and Manhattan Beach were the summer resort towns for Manhattan's elite, sort of the mid-19th century Hamptons. The original Lundy Brothers were his five sons, including Irving's father, Frederick Jr. By then Sheepshead Bay Racetrack, Brighton Beach Race Course and Gravesend Racetrack had made South Brooklyn the horse-racing capital of the country, patronized by the millionaire sportsmen of the Gilded Age and Gay Nineties. Lundy Brothers supplied fish to the hotels and restaurants that catered to this crowd. By 1880 they had three retail fish markets, their own clam beds, and a boat rental business in addition to their wholesale fish business. Frederick Jr. was active in the Democratic Party in Brooklyn and served as county registrar and tax commissioner. He married a judge's daughter, bought up a lot of waterfront property in Sheepshead Bay and was recognized as one of Brooklyn's leading citizens.
The affluent sporting crowd still frequented Sheepshead Bay in 1895 when Irving, as he preferred to be called, was born, but with the closing of the racetracks the community went into decline. The red-haired, blue-eyed youngster started his first business, a chowder stand on the pier, when he was 9 years old. The business was booming when he went off to serve in the Navy during the First World War. While he was away, his mother died in the great influenza pandemic of 1917. His father died a year later, making Irving the head of the family at 23. He opened a clam shack with his brothers who did much of the clamming while Irving oversaw the retail operation. In 1920 the rowboat carrying his three brothers and an employee back to their winter quarters on a mud flat in Jamaica Bay where they had an oyster bed was hit by an ice floe and sank. The youngest brother, 17-year old Stanley, was separated from the others in the thick fog and drowned. Twenty-one year old Clayton died trying to save him. Allen Lundy and his employee made it to the beach. Irving was devastated and filled the Methodist church the family attended with memorials. It is said he never again got in a boat or swam.
By the time he opened his first restaurant in 1926, Irving was already a millionaire. According to an 1989 Newsday feature story on Irving and his family, the Lundys were also rum runners. Allen would take his speedboat out beyond the territorial waters to meet the supply boat and then bring the contraband ashore, sometimes with the Coast Guard in pursuit, He once took a bullet in his thigh. The two brothers and their three sisters manned barricades along the piers with shotguns to keep out any competitors. They were one tough crew of Methodists.
As a young man Irving was something of a man about town, palling around with Henry Ford and frequenting city nightclubs. He liked fine clothes and jewelry. He was almost certainly gay. Although he had a few flings with women as a young man, his closest relationship was with Henry Linker, his companion for over thirty years. Linker helped manage the restaurant. They lived together. They drove around town in an aquamarine Lincoln Zephyr with brown leather seats and frequented the Cotton Club in the early days. Irving never fully recovered when Linker died in the late 1950s.
In 1926 a trio of thugs kidnapped Linker and Lundy as they were closing the restaurant. They were after the flashy diamond ring Irving often wore. He happened not to be wearing it that day and, when he refused to tell them where it was, they threatened to kill him. He stood his ground and the thieves satisfied themselves with his diamond stickpin and four thousand dollars from the restaurant safe. They left Linker and Lundy with enough money for cab fare home after telling them how much they enjoyed eating in their restaurant. They eventually were apprehended and sentenced to life in prison.
After the incident Lundy became more socially reclusive and suspicious of strangers. His brother Allen most often dealt with the restaurant customers after that although Irving was very much in charge. Later his nephews joined the business. Irving and Linker spent much of their free time at his estate in the Catskills, which eventually grew to 30,000 acres. Linker was a pilot and flew them up. Irving imagined himself a rancher often dressing in Stetson, cowboy boots and western clothes when he worked the land or oversaw his herd of Angus cattle. He also had two estates on Long Island, including one in Brookville that had belonged to a Vanderbilt. In town he now usually wore a threadbare camel hair coat and fedora.
The WPA renovation of the Sheepshead Bay waterfront was a disaster for most of the small businesses on the pier but an opportunity for Irving who made his mammoth new showplace the centerpiece of a reborn Sheepshead Bay reinvented as a place for Brooklyn's emerging middle class. He and Linker lived in an adjacent house. During the '30s and '40s he bought up much of the property along the waterfront that he had not already inherited. But he missed the old "Clam Coast" destroyed by the renovation and was said to be a benevolent landlord to the businesses that remained and a frequent anonymous benefactor to individuals and families from the old days. His political connections, as well as those of his loyal patrons, stopped the feds from permanently closing the new restaurant in 1935 for liquor violations. He was also one of the few to win a battle against Robert Moses who was ramming the Belt Parkway through the seaside communities in the 1930s.
Irving Lundy was not only a product of Old Brooklyn and the founder of a beloved institution of the New Brooklyn of the mid-twentieth century, but also a tragic victim of the borough's disintegration in the 1970s. He had become almost a total recluse after Linker's death, living in an apartment over the restaurant with a pack of Irish setters. The almost unbelievably horrific and violent story of the final decade of his life and of his restaurant, including the murder of his sister and brother-in-law, his betrayal by his closest associate and the suspicious circumstances of his own death, is told in an extensive 1989 Newsday feature story available for sale here at the newspaper's archives or through ProQuest.