John Brooks Leavitt - Later Life and Legacy

Later Life and Legacy

John Brooks Leavitt was a member of the University Club, the Social Reform Club, the New York City League of Reform, the National Civil Service Reform League, the Barnard Club, Onteora Club, the Bar Association of New York City, the New York State Bar Association, the American Bar Association and the reform-minded Civil Service League. Leavitt was a long-serving member of the New York Bar Association's Committee on Unlawful Practice of the Law, as well as the Committee on the Prevention of Unnecessary Litigation. He regularly contributed articles to The Counsellor, the New York Law School Law Journal, where he was listed as contributor.

Leavitt kept a law office at 30 Broad Street in downtown Manhattan. He was considered a Mugwump Republican. Until the end of his life Leavitt served in various volunteer capacities with the Protestant Episcopal Church for the diocese of New York, and was the longtime Senior Warden at St. Mark's Church in-the-Bowery in Manhattan's East Village.

Leavitt was a founding director in 1891 of the East Side House, a settlement house on the East Side of Manhattan endowed by Charles B. Webster of R. H. Macy & Co. The House was designed to form a 'self-supporting club which should keep the workingmen off the streets and out of the saloons."

Leavitt was active in the Alumni Associations of Columbia College and Kenyon College, which conferred an honorary Doctor of Laws degree on him in 1896. He continued to write widely for periodicals and magazines, and often spoke to gatherings on the subject of municipal and corporate corruption. Leavitt was married in 1879 at Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, to Mary Keith, daughter of Rev. Ormes B. Keith of Philadelphia, and great-niece of Elias Boudinot, president of the United States Congress at the close of the Revolutionary War. Mary (Keith) Leavitt died at the couple's home at 1 Lexington Avenue at Gramercy Park in Lower Manhattan on July 3, 1916, at age 59.