Cold Spring Hills
WHEN the financier Otto Herman Kahn built his own French chateau here in 1917, he first created a train stop in Cold Spring Harbor to shuttle laborers to his 443-acre property.
There, they fashioned an earthen hill and topped it with the 109,000-square-foot residence that Kahn called Oheka Castle. An acronym for the beginning letters of his first, middle and last names, the name stuck.
Today, his 18-hole golf course, three cottages and a stable on 169 acres of his former estate are owned by the private Cold Spring Country Club; all but 23 acres of the remaining land surrounding the chateau have been subsumed into an upscale subdivision of 306 homes called Cold Spring Hills. For 24 years, the owner of Oheka Castle itself, Gary Melius, has lived there, operating it as a 32-room luxury hotel and a catering business for six-figure weddings and other big-ticket affairs.
Now making his third attempt to build condominiums on the site, Mr. Melius is shopping around a proposal to the local civic group. He wants to buy 13 wooded acres from the Cold Spring Country Club and, combining it with about 12 acres he owns around the chateau, build 150 condo apartments in three three-story buildings with underground parking garages. The units will average about 2,500 square feet, he said. He also plans a 54,000-square-foot spa in one of the condo buildings, and a separate sports center with indoor and outdoor pools, tennis and racquetball courts.
The Cold Spring Country Club — which has already had its share of development proposals to consider — has agreed to have its members vote on the land purchase, Mr. Melius said. The vote will take place on May 22, according to James Margolin, a club member and a lawyer involved in the negotiations.
Slow real estate sales on the Island and the excess inventory of homes lingering on the market have done little to diminish the developer-turned-castle-owner’s enthusiasm for the idea of million-dollar condominiums on this hilly wooded expanse looking out over Cold Spring Harbor.
“You have to take some chances,” Mr. Melius said of the condo plan — which is still, he estimates, at least five years from completion. “You have to hope when it hits the street, the market has recovered.”
Before the bulldozers can cut their swaths into the clusters of tall trees next to the golf course, the plan needs permits from the encompassing town of Huntington, and a moratorium on golf course development needs to be lifted. The town enacted the ban in 2005 after eight golf courses were offered for sale and several developers submitted proposals to build residential homes on some courses. Town officials have yet to develop a zoning classification for the courses to regulate how they can be developed.
In the surrounding community of mostly midcentury ranches, colonials and split-level homes on half- and one-acre lots, the Cold Spring Hills Civic Association remains focused on one key point as it considers the Melius proposal: Holding on to its views of hilly golfing greens and ribbons of tall mature trees is paramount.
“The consensus is that we want the golf course preserved,” said Gayle Snyder, the association’s chairwoman. “We’re willing to work with him on a plan that saves the golf course.”
Since part of Mr. Melius’s proposal to the country club is to buy development rights to the course — to protect it rather than to build on it, he says — the civic group may well end up supporting him.
“I want to protect Oheka’s line of sight as well,” Mr. Melius said. He also wants “a say in what’s going to be built here,” he added. “Oheka is a high-end facility and, not to sound snobby, but we want to keep everybody around the same way.”
In any case, the civic group already has its hands full opposing another, denser, proposal in its early stages. That plan is for 18 acres across the street from the gated entrance to the Cold Spring Hills development on Jericho Turnpike, one of Long Island’s main commercial corridors.
The project, proposed by Triangle Equities of Queens for residents 55 and over, has been scaled back from 136 to 80 attached town houses, according to Bram Weber, a Melville lawyer representing Triangle. But Cold Spring Hills residents still think it is too dense.
Just over the Nassau County border, many attached town-house communities and subdivisions along Jericho Turnpike have been built in recent years. But in this part of Huntington, where Walt Whitman was born and hiked the trails to Jayne’s Hill, Long Island’s highest point, the Triangle plan would clash with nearby one- and two-acre lots with single-family homes, the civic association contends.
“Triangle asked us what we thought of 80 units instead of 136,” Ms. Snyder said. “We said, ‘Why don’t you build 15 houses?’”
Luckily for Mr. Melius, the civic group didn’t respond the same way to his plan. For one thing, Ms. Snyder said, his condos would be out of site of the homes in Cold Spring Hills. For another, if Mr. Melius made good on his preservation promise, there would still be open views.
“The country club is a different situation,” Ms. Snyder said, “because we’re looking to save the golf course.”
