Memories of Lundy's of Sheepshead Bay

Anyone who ate there during its heyday in the mid-1900s as a landmark seafood emporium along Brooklyn’s Sheepshead Bay would tell you dining at Lundy’s was a unique and mostly tasty experience. Inside the massive, hulking, Spanish Colonial Revival structure with a red-tile roof and plenty of decorative ironwork throughout its multi-tiered dining hall, patrons would consume buckets of clam chowder, mounds of steamers, bushels of corn on the cob, tons of half lobsters and chicken halves, and plenty upon plenty small buttered biscuits.  

My mouth waters at the memory, for, while the outside of the building has remained intact as a historical landmark, Lundy’s as a restaurant has been closed for 17 years, but really, as the source of my culinary recall, for more than three decades. 

I’m waxing nostalgic because of news that the restaurant will be resurrected, not at its iconic location at the end of Ocean Avenue where it meets Emmons Avenue, but rather in a nondescript corner of Red Hook, a former working class coastal section of Brooklyn that has undergone gentrification over the last decade or more (https://gothamist.com/arts-entertainment/exclusive-lundys-an-iconic-seafood-restaurant-returns-to-brooklyn-after-17-years).

I grew up on Avenue W between East 18th and 19th streets, directly five city blocks north of Lundy’s. My family did not eat there. My father did not eat shellfish. I didn’t taste lobster until I was 16, in a restaurant in Lake George on a day off from summer camp. Ever since Lobster has been a staple of my out-of-home cuisine. 

My first hand experience inside Lundy’s was slight but memorable. I ate there less than a handful of times. The food was plentiful, affordable ($8 for a shore dinner, equal to a little more than $62 today), but not overly delectable. 

The most memorable aspect of eating at Lundy’s was the simple action of actually being able to to eat there.

Going to Lundy’s was an occasion, an occasion to be shared with a multitude of people. It was said Lundy’s served an average of 2,000 guests a day, up to 10,000 on Sundays and 15,000 one holidays. 

With so many patrons seeking tables, eating at Lundy’s became an exercise in strategic planning as complicated as any military maneuver. Like Horn & Hardart’s automat of days of yore, no reservations were accepted, there were no hostesses, securing a table was the responsibility of each party. 

Patrons had to carefully analyze which diners were nearing completion of their meals, which were dawdling over coffee or a cigarette, oblivious to the presence of their successors hovering over them, as close as they could get without being too offensive. Khaki-jacketed waiters—all Black men—slid silently among the famished and the stuffed as the cacophony of heavy plates and loud, Jewish, Italian and Irish voices filled the air.

I find it hard to believe a transplanted Lundy’s will find its sea-legs in Red Hook. The ambience won’t be the same. The value? Doubtful. The experience? Don’t expect the same. But then, there are few still living who experienced Lundy’s at its peak. Perhaps the new Lundy’s may succeed. But it can hardly expect to be the same or as memorable as Lundy’s of Sheepshead Bay. 

Finding Some Silver Linings in a Catastrophe

There’s a TV character whose name escapes me for now whose perennial opening line, spoken in Brooklynese, is, “How’re ya doin’?”

“Not great,” would be my reply these days, five days after the catastrophe. 

I studiously avoided reading post-mortems about the election until, just after midnight Friday when I couldn’t sleep, I opened an essay from Heather Cox Richardson, author of the blog “Letters from an American.”

Citing examples from reports (I had chosen not to read), Richardson pointed out that many, many voters were clueless to the truth behind Donald Trump’s positions and those of Kamala Harris. 

“In Salon today,” she wrote, “Amanda Marcotte noted that in states all across the country where voters backed Trump, they also voted for abortion rights, higher minimum wage, paid sick and family leave, and even to ban employers from forcing their employees to sit through right-wing or anti-union meetings. She points out that 12% of voters in Missouri voted both for abortion rights and for Trump.

“Marcotte recalled that Catherine Rampell and Youyou Zhou of the Washington Post showed before the election that voters overwhelmingly preferred Harris’s policies to Trump’s if they didn’t know which candidate proposed them.  An Ipsos/Reuters poll from October showed that voters who were misinformed about immigration, crime, and the economy tended to vote Republican, while those who knew the facts preferred Democrats.” 

Another example of the truism, “Never overestimate the intelligence of the average American.” 

What turned these “useful idiots” into Republican voters was an overwhelming misinformation campaign by social media miscreants and a right-wing media complex led by Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News. The campaign successfully painted Harris as the extremist.

While Democrats are licking their wounds, many self-inflicted because of far-out progressive positions that Harris could not distance herself from, the aggressive across the board self-flagellation may be unwarranted. Yes, Trump swept all seven battleground states, but consider these grassroots results in key states:

• Pennsylvania Democrats captured enough seats to retain control of the state House; 
• North Carolina elected Democrat Josh Stein as governor. Democrats won enough seats in the State House to break a Republican supermajority, thus restoring to the governor the power of the veto;
• Republican supermajority was broken in Wisconsin’s Senate, while Democrats added seats in the GOP controlled Assembly;
• In a Minnesota special election, Democrats defended their supermajority in the Senate; 
• Abortion rights ballot measures won in seven out of 10 states. 

Trump’s national victory in the Electoral College was not all it has been cracked up to be in the popular vote. For sure, he beat Harris, but his 74,708,910 total was less than half a million more than his 2020 total of 74,223,975. 

Harris received 70,980,381 votes compared to Joe Biden’s 81,283,501.

Trump won because some 10 million voters chose to express their disappointment with the Democratic candidate by not voting. 

What is not explained is that if Trump improved among Black men, Hispanics and women, how is it his vote total did not dramatically go up? Could it be that even some, probably many, Republicans had enough of him and, like their Democratic counterparts, they too just sat home, too disillusioned to trudge down to the polling place or to the mailbox to cast their ballots?

Don’t expect me, or anyone, to provide concrete answers. They will be no more accurate than the polls predicting a close election were.

Trumpism will be with us for the next four years, though the 2026 Senate and House races will provide a report card on how successful his programs will be perceived. Recall that in 2018 Democrats were able to recapture a majority in the House.

So, in two years the electorate will decide if the market basket of goods, especially for eggs and gasoline, is lower than in 2024; if the deficit has been reduced, if gross domestic product (GDP) has gone up; what direction unemployment has taken; if interest rates have declined; if the tariffs he has espoused have been effective or have taxed consumers; if the border is more secure; if Trump has deported illegal migrants without incident; if he has supported a national abortion ban; if he has solved the Ukraine-Russia war and the Israeli-Hamas-Hezbollah-Iran war, and no new war has broken out that affects American interests; if he has emasculated NATO; if he has replaced Obamacare without jeopardizing coverage of pre-existing conditions; and, if he exacted revenge on his enemies?  

Learning to Live with a New Reality

We did it once before. We hope we can do it again. 

After all, my retirement portfolio increased the first time. Sure, under Joe Biden’s watch the increase was greater, but that first gain ain’t nothing to sneeze at. 

So I say to myself: Learn to live with the reality. I must repeatedly tell myself—Think of Number One. Don’t dwell on the fallout to democracy, international relations, the environment, the rule of law, immigration, access to reproductive rights and all aspects of health care, equal rights, the separation of church and state. 

You’re 75. As long as the stock market doesn’t crash and missiles don’t rain down on America, how bad can it be? 

Stop thinking globally, or nationally. Think just of yourself. That’s what a majority of Americans just did. They chose to reward personal fulfillment with little or no thought to the consequences they could unleash on America and the world. 

But, I’m not sure I can stop thinking of others. My upbringing—from my parents, my education, my profession, my spouse, my friends, my religion, my spiritual leaders—instilled in me an ethos that transcends “Me.” 

Can I survive the next four years and the potential transformation of a country for decades to come? Physically? For sure. I’ll play more pickleball. Watch more Netflix. Play more poker. Travel more. And when I cannot sleep through the night, play more solitaire. 

Emotionally? I grieve for the future my children and grandchildren will have to persevere through. I have lived in an America Franklin Delano Roosevelt fashioned 80 years ago, an America that strived to shield its citizens from economic and ideological assaults. 

The safety net FDR spun for America and the world is in jeopardy. 

I am 75. I do not speak Yiddish. I know a smattering of Yiddish words. One sums up my, and possibly your, feelings at this moment:

Oy!!!