Old Westbury, NY real estate market

Old Westbury sits split between the Town of North Hempstead and the Town of Oyster Bay in Nassau County, on the North Shore. The name history alone is worth knowing before you write a contract here. The area was first called Wallage, then Wood Edge by 1663, then Plainedge by 1675, before Henry Willis renamed it Westbury around 1683 after his hometown in Wiltshire, England. The Old got added around 1841 when the post office needed to tell it apart from a Westbury in Cayuga County, and the village kept that name when it incorporated in 1924, splitting off from what is now the separate Village of Westbury to its south.

The land here was Quaker farm country until the railroad arrived in 1836. After the Civil War, New York money moved in for the flat, wooded Hempstead Plains, building estates for horses, fox hunting, and polo at the Meadow Brook Polo Club. What got built still shapes the place. Westbury House, home of John Shaffer Phipps, is now open to the public as Old Westbury Gardens. Robert Low Bacon built Old Acres in an Italian villa style. Architect Thomas Hastings built his own house, Bagatelle, in 1908. The A. Conger Goodyear House, designed by Edward Durell Stone in 1938, was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2003 specifically to keep it from being torn down for subdivision. A former Whitney estate is now split between the Old Westbury Country Club and the New York Institute of Technology, and a 187 foot tower built as a water tower for the Cornelius Vanderbilt Whitney estate did lookout duty in World War Two before becoming the golf club's landmark feature today.

The village boundaries have moved more than once. In a 1948 vote, 375 acres seceded from Old Westbury to become unincorporated land under the Town of North Hempstead, and part of that land became the Levitt built Roslyn Country Club development. A second piece was annexed by the Village of East Hills in 1949, which shifted police coverage there to the Nassau County Police Department. Old Westbury also fought the routing of the Northern State Parkway, pushing Robert Moses to move it five miles south, and the state later bought Charles E. Wilson's estate along the village edge for the Long Island Expressway. For anyone buying or selling here, that history matters on paper: check which town line a property sits on, since North Hempstead and Oyster Bay both reach into the village and services and tax bills follow the boundary.