Staghead Club

The building that was the Staghead Club is a two-story vernacular building with a flat roof and glass windows facing Linden Boulevard. It is attached to a block of similar buildings on either side of it. All have a series of decorative arches along the cornice with small, pointed spires at the corners of each building projecting above the roofline. An advertisement from 1940 advertises six rooms, a bath, a closed porch and a garage at 189-29 Linden Boulevard.  

The building was built in 1920, but little other information on 189-20 Linden Boulevard can be found until the 1930s, when it became a part of the Stagshead chain of restaurants. Alternatively referred to as the Stagshead Cafe, Stags Head Cafe, Staggs Head, Staghead Cafe, or the Stagehead Tavern, the chain was owned and managed by Michael “Barney” Prendergast. Michael Prendergast emigrated from the Mayo region of Ireland in 1926 and was an important part of the Irish-American immigrant community in New York City in the 1930s, 40s and early 50s. In 1933 he married his wife, Elizabeth Prendergast, who would help him manage his chain of restaurants.  

By 1937 a Stagshead restaurant was active in the building and was called Stagshead Cafe by local newspapers. At this time there were already numerous other Stagshead restaurants scattered throughout New York City - all called a variety of slightly different names - with locations in Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, and lower Westchester County. The Stagshead chain appears to have been successful throughout the 1930s and 40s. 

The Stagshead restaurant on Linden adapted with the rest of the county as World War 2 raged. The Jamaica Rationing Board, working with the Office of Price Administration, opened a community price panel in the building in 1944 and asked for volunteers from the local community to help carry out its price control program. At the end of the war the Stagshead restaurant on Linden hired a clerk named Edward Hannon who was a veteran of the 602nd Medical Clearing Company. 

By the early ‘50s, Michael “Barney” Prendergast was a wealthy and successful businessman. One newspaper described him as owning “... as many places as a dressmaker has buttons….” His good fortune would become a foul curse on one late night in 1953 when Michael escorted his secretary to her home in New Jersey and intended to drive his brand-new Cadillac back to the city in the early hours of the morning. He never made it. The next morning Michael Prendergast was found dead in Harlem with a bullet hole in his head; days later his Cadillac was found abandoned, one of his assailants having used it to escape the scene of the crime. His murder set off a local panic over possible serial killers active in the area until police arrested three Harlem teens, who stated they had targeted Michael because of his Cadillac. All three would later receive life sentences for the murder. 

In the direct aftermath of Michael’s murder, his wife, Elizabeth Prendergast, took over legal ownership of the Stagshead restaurant on Linden, but she would pass ownership of the building to Patrick Breen, who owned the restaurant throughout the rest of the ‘50s and ‘60s. It is during this era, the early and mid 1960s, that the Stagshead restaurant appeared in the Green Book under the name Staghead Club - this name, Staghead Club, appears nowhere else besides the Green Book. In 1986, Patrick Breen sold the building to the Spiritual Christian Supply Store, which has remained in the building ever since.