OHEKA CASTLE Hotel & Estate

About

A century ago, financier and philanthropist Otto Hermann Kahn built OHEKA CASTLE in the middle of a 443-acre plot on the highest point on Long Island in Cold Spring Harbor for an estimated cost of $11 million ($158 million in today’s currency). At the time of its construction, the French-style chateau was—and still is today—the second-largest private residence ever built in America. During the Gilded Age of the 1920s, Kahn used the 109,000-square-foot, 127-room estate as a summer home where he hosted lavish parties and regularly entertained royalty, heads of state, and Hollywood stars.

After Otto Kahn died in 1934, the estate changed hands several times, serving as a retreat for New York sanitation workers and a government training school for Merchant Marine radio operators. In 1948, the Eastern Military Academy bought OHEKA, bulldozed the gardens, subdivided the rooms, and painted over the walls. After the school went bankrupt 30 years later, OHEKA stood abandoned, except by vandals who set numerous fires over five years. In 1984, developer Gary Melius purchased OHEKA and the remaining 23 acres that surrounded the estate and began the painstaking challenge of restoring the Castle to its original grandeur.