About Old Westbury, NY

Old Westbury is a village in the towns of North Hempstead and Oyster Bay in Nassau County, on the North Shore of Long Island, in New York, United States. The population was 4,671 at the 2010 census. The Incorporated Village of Old Westbury is one of the wealthiest villages in the country as well as the second-richest zip code in the New York State, topped only by Harrison in Westchester County. In 2007, Business Week dubbed Old Westbury as New York's most expensive suburb. Old Westbury Gardens has been recognized as one of the three best public gardens in the world by Four Seasons Hotels magazine. == History == Westbury was founded by Edmond Titus, and was later joined by Henry Willis, one of the first English settlers. Westbury had been a Quaker community of isolated farms until the railroad came in 1836. After the Civil War, the New York elite discovered that the rich, well-wooded flat countryside of the Hempstead Plains was a place to raise horses, and to hunt foxes and play polo at the Meadow Brook Polo Club. The Village of Old Westbury was incorporated in 1924, separating itself from Westbury, the adjacent area that housed many of the families of the construction and building staffs for the Old Westbury mansions. The "Old" part of Old Westbury's name reflects the community's need for its postal address to be different from the Westbury in Cayuga County, as per postal requirements (it had been using a postal address of North Hempstead for this reason); residents did this when they wanted a local post office ca.