Frank L. Babbott

The whimsical smile of Frank Lusk Babbott, his quiet and friendly conversation, had long been familiar to the Century. During his membership of nearly forty years, he was a constant day-time visitor at the Club-house; he rarely missed a monthly-meeting night. This happened despite his lifelong residence across the river, and notwithstanding the fact that Babbott was a survivor of that old-time group to whom Brooklyn was the civic and social centre and New York a useful but uninteresting suburb. Babbott was a public-spirited Brooklynite. His own active life reached back into the period when every worthwhile citizen of that community knew all the others, and on stated occasions mingled with them sociably at the old Academy on Montague Street or at Plymouth and Pilgrim Church. Himself for many years trustee of Brooklyn’s Public Library and Academy of Music, director of its principal fiduciary institutions, active member of its Board of Education and Municipal Art commission, Babbott epitomized the spirit which made some of his older fellow-citizens shake their heads when the Brooklyn Bridge supplanted the Fulton and Wall Street ferries, and which subsequently brought to all of them the mournful feeling that the Greater New York charter was the ending of an era. But to Babbott, the Century Club was an institution that knew no city or borough boundaries, and with which he could unhesitatingly share his loyalty.

Alexander Dana Noyes
1934 Century Association Yearbook