Mining the Gold Coast mansions for tourism

Nancy Melius, the marketing and design director at Oheka Castle in Huntington, likes to think big. So as founder and president of Gold Coast Mansions Historic Long Island, Melius has big plans for May, which is Long Island History Month, designated last year by the clerks of both counties.

Long Island's Gold Coast-era mansions are visited each year by about 2,500 people, said Melius. She wants to boost that number to about 50,000 annually, beginning this year.

Gold Coast Mansions Historic Long Island held its kickoff meeting at Oheka Castle, the former Otto Kahn mansion, last week.

Last year the organization started historiclongisland .com, a website detailing many of the 40 Gold Coast mansions on the Island. Eight of them, Melius said, are open to the public, including Oheka Castle, Old Westbury Gardens and the Vanderbilt Museum in Centerport.

Melius' organization plans to hand out promotional cards to bring attention to the website.

"I would like to bring in 50,000 new visitors a year," Melius said. "I think Long Island has tended not to look at these [mansions] as a benefit. They just looked on them as places that need a lot of money. But they also bring in revenue and jobs. We can create jobs by bringing in tourism."

Carol C. Lucca, president of the Huntington-based tour organization All Around Long Island, (known as Long Island Tours), who was at the meeting last week, said that she has arranged for two motor coaches to take 100 people to the mansions next month.

The tours, Lucca said, "make people aware of what's there, and they go back to these places on their own."