3. Oheka Castle
Oheka Castle is an extensive chateau in West Hills, just a short drive from downtown Huntington. Commissioned in 1917 by Otto Hermann Kahn, the home was built as a collaboration between Delano & Aldrich and landscape architects Beatrix Farrand, John Charles Olmsted, and Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr. Kahn passed away in 1934, after which his family sold the French-style chateau to the Welfare Fund of Sanitation Workers. It was abandoned in 1979 after serving as a retirement home for sanitation workers, a radio operator’s school for the Merchant Marines, and a home for the Eastern Military Academy, Today, the castle operates as an event venue and rents out hotel rooms.
Oheka is the second-largest private home in America after the Biltmore estate in North Carolina built by George Vanderbilt. In the two years it took to build Oheka Castle, architects also built a large hill on which the castle would stand, making Oheka Castle the highest point on Long Island at the time. Inside the exquisite mansion, which hosted many roaring twenties parties, there once was a secret tunnel in one of the bookcases in the library.