Babylon Village

A Rowdy Tavern Inspired a Name

By Molly McCarthy | Staff Writer

At first, it was little more than a stagecoach stop. Gradually over two centuries, it evolved from farming village to summer resort to suburban bedroom community.

But like many Long Island villages, Babylon's diverse history is hard to encapsulate. Home to master planner Robert Moses, Babylon also was where wireless communications and the Negro baseball leagues got their starts. ``There were many eras of Babylon,'' says Alice Zaruka, president of the Babylon Village Historical Society. ``It was a stagecoach stop, then the trolley came, then the hotels. There were 11 hotels in the village during its summer resort heydey. Then it turned into a commuter community.''

Before the hotels and the trolley and the railroad, there wasn't much but salt hay. No dwellings existed in Babylon before 1700. And, even by the time the Revolution came, there were only a few settlers in the region.

When Nathaniel Conklin built his home at the corner of Main Street and Deer Park Avenue in 1803, Babylon was still known as Huntington South and a rowdy tavern called the American Hotel stood next door. Conklin's mother wasn't thrilled about the hotel's proximity, characterizing the place as ``another Babylon.'' However, the younger Conklin prevailed, built the house and carved a retort to his mother on the chimney. The stone tablet reads: ``New Babylon. This House Built By Nat. Conklin 1803.'' Minus the ``New,'' the name stuck.

Conklin, in that day the area's largest landowner, soon built a tannery that would spearhead Babylon's rise as a commercial center. Some entrepreneurs invested in grist, saw and flour mills, while others capitalized on the bluefish and eels pulled from the bay and shipped to Brooklyn markets.

By the 1890s, Babylon was described as a ``thriving country town,'' in the words of one observer at the time, a ``spick-and-span array of cottages embowered in trees, flowers and shrubbery, and resting on the shore, of a great, blue-bosomed, green-edged tranquil bay.'' Two miles north of the shore, millionaire August Belmont maintained a sprawling estate with its own private racetrack that would later be transformed into Belmont Lake State Park. Closer to the village, the 350-room Argyle Hotel enticed wealthy New Yorkers to spend their summer leisure by Babylon's bay.

Frank Thompson, an African-American, managed a huge service staff as a head waiter at the Argyle Hotel. When they weren't waiting tables in the lavish dining areas of the hotel, Thompson and his cohorts were on the baseball field. Thompson formed a team he called the Athletics, which in 1885 was christened by a promoter as the Cuban Giants to make the black team more acceptable to white American fans. Thompson and his mates didn't know it at the time, but they would later be designated the first all-black professional team in America.

And it wasn't long after that that Babylon collected another first. In 1901, shortly after returning from Newfoundland, where he received the first wireless transmission - or three short clicks signaling the Morse code letter S - from across the Atlantic, physicist Guglielmo Marconi came to Babylon. Having found a suitable spot near the shore, he set up shop in a 12-foot-square wooden shack at Fire Island Avenue and Virginia Road. Though it looked more like a tool shed, Marconi's shack became the first shore-to-ship wireless relay station. From there, Marconi could communicate with ships offshore using the wireless communications system that was the forerunner of commercial radio.

Robert Moses, a Connecticut native, first saw Babylon in the early 1920s when friends invited him and his wife, Mary, out for summer weekends. Moses fell in love with Babylon and the entire South Shore, renting a bungalow in the summer of 1922 and eventually buying a home on Thompson Avenue. Many of Moses' grand ideas, like Jones Beach, were hatched on drives or boat rides around his new hometown. Because Moses had no drivers' license, a driver chauffeured him around Long Island. In fact, Babylon residents in the 1930s often spotted the state park commissioner's limousine speeding through the streets of the village on the way to the dock, where he'd board a state-owned yacht to explore area waterways.

Despite his hectic schedule, Moses always found time for a swim, sometimes twice a day, either at Jones Beach, in the bay or in the creek behind his home. More than any other feature, it was the water that first attracted Moses and kept him there.

In 1996, Alice Zaruka's group interviewed several old-timers about growing up in Babylon, and water was foremost in their recollections. ``They were fisherman, clammers or captains for wealthy people who had boats,'' Zaruka said. ``Their love of the water was the main thing. It's a central part of Babylon's heritage.''

Claim to Fame: Besides Moses, Marconi, Belmont and baseball, there is Bob Keeshan. Babylon is the home of the man known as TV's first Captain Kangaroo.

Where to Find More: ``Huntington-Babylon Town History,'' by the Huntington Historical Society,1935, Babylon Village Historical and Preservation Society.