Chamber honors police commissioner, Bungalow Bar owner
BY BENJAMIN FANG
Nearly 300 business leaders attended this year’s Queens Chamber of Commerce’s St. Patrick’s Day Luncheon at Antun’s in Queens Village. With the sound of Irish music filling the catering hall, the celebration honored two prominent Irish-American New Yorkers.
The St. Patrick’s Business Person of the Year Award went to Dan Tubridy, proprietor of the Bungalow Bar in Rockaway Beach and founder of In Good Company Hospitality Group. Today, the hospitality group runs 13 restaurants and employs over 1,200 people at some of Manhattan’s most well-known eateries, including Park Avenue Tavern, Parker & Quinn and The Refinery Rooftop.
Their latest venture is the new Rockaway Beach Hotel, which Tubridy said will be the first boutique hotel in the Rockaways since the 1940s. Expected to open in the spring, the hotel will feature 53 rooms, eight apartments, year-round restaurant, rooftop lounge, pool bar and event space. It will also provide between 150 and 200 new jobs in a community that has the highest unemployment rate in the five boroughs, according to Tubridy.
“The Rockaway Beach Hotel represents, if not a culmination, certainly a significant step in the continued revitalization of an unpolished New York City jewel,” he said, “that has long been a casualty of bureaucratic neglect and administrative mismanagement.” Tubridy praised small business owners, calling them job creators, risk takers and innovators who are the “backbone of our local economy.”
“Together, we are pioneers who sense opportunity and optimism where others may not,” he said. “Your unique vision and commitment to the unproven has the power to transform entire neighborhoods, and as a result, people’s lives.”
More than 60 of Tubridy’s family and friends attended the St. Patrick’s Day Luncheon, though he admitted some of them were also excited to meet the celebration’s keynote speaker.
The Public Service Award went to Police Commissioner Dermot Shea, the 44th person to hold the post in the history of New York City and a 29-year veteran of the NYPD. Shea’s parents immigrated from Ireland in the 1950s and met at an Irish dance in New York City.
They settled in Sunnyside, where they raised five children in a one-bedroom apartment. The Sunnyside native was a member of Queen of Angels parish and attended Catholic grammar school there for seven years.
“Everything, I owe to my family growing up,” he said. “My mother and father really teaching what’s important about life.”
Shea joined the NYPD in April 1991 as a police officer in the 46th Precinct in the Bronx. After several promotions, he led the 50th and 44th precincts as commanding officer. He eventually became deputy commissioner of operations in March 2014. Two years later, he was named chief of crime control strategies before becoming chief of detectives in April 2018.
He succeeded James O’Neill, another Irish-American, as police commissioner in December 2019. The top cop said he was accepting the Public Service Award on behalf of 55,000 members of the NYPD.
“I may be sitting on top of the peak here, but there’s an incredible team underneath me of men and women at the executive level,” he said, “right down to the boots on the ground, which is where all the work gets done.”
He added that a “tremendous” support staff of civilians and uniformed members do “amazing things everyday.”
“It’s going home and doing things after hours,” he said. “It’s thinking outside the box, going above and beyond.”
Noting the presence of the Marine Corps at the luncheon, Shea said his father joined the Army and became a sergeant in the 50s. His younger brother, an accountant and lawyer by training, joined the Army after the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001.
“It’s never been lost on me, the men and women that wear uniform,” he said, “protecting our rights across this great country. “You don’t have to look hard for heroes,” Shea added. “They’re all around us.”
