Scroll through active listings in the Roslyn Country Club pocket of Roslyn Heights and you'll see the same phrase again and again: prestigious Country Club section. It reads like an amenity, the kind of line that justifies a premium. And there is a premium. Homes currently listed with that tag carry a median asking price near $1.85 million, well above the broader Roslyn Heights market. What the listing photos don't show you is that the club itself has been closed since 2007, tied up in litigation for most of two decades, and that the town government spent years trying and failing to take it over.
If you're comparing pockets of Roslyn Heights before making an offer, that gap between the marketing language and the actual state of the amenity is the thing worth understanding before anything else.
A deed clause, not a club membership
Roslyn Country Club was built by Levitt and Sons starting in the 1950s, and the right to use the clubhouse and pool wasn't sold as a standard homeowners association benefit. It was written into the original deeds as an easement tied to specific parcels. That distinction matters more than it sounds like it should. An HOA amenity is something a board maintains and can be sued over collectively. A deed easement is something a title company has to trace back to a 1959 transaction, parcel by parcel, and it can be contested by whoever owns the underlying land.
That's exactly what happened. The property changed hands more than once, eventually landing with Mineola-based Corona Realty Holdings under owner Manouchehr Malekan. In the 1990s Malekan sued residents to try to extinguish those easement rights outright. He lost. He closed the club anyway in 2007, and roughly 400 residents countersued over being denied access their deeds said they were entitled to.
Three attempts to buy it back. None of them held.
The Town of North Hempstead spent years trying to solve this by buying the land outright. Laid out in order, the sequence looks like this:
- 2012 — The town creates the Roslyn Heights Park District specifically to fund a purchase, and agrees to buy roughly 7.2 of the property's 10 acres for $2 million.
- End of 2014 — That purchase agreement expires without closing.
- Following a court ruling ordering the remaining resident lawsuits to trial or dismissal — the town lines up a $14.2 million clubhouse and pool renovation, with completion targeted for 2017. The land still doesn't change hands.
- 2018 — The town board approves a revised $10.9 million capital plan targeting completion by 2020, again contingent on winning the litigation against Corona Realty Holdings.
- Most recent account, per the Roslyn Country Club community association's own site — the State Supreme Court throws out the town's last remaining legal case against the property owner, ending the effort without the town ever taking title.
Two decades of effort, and the property is still privately held with its access rights unresolved. This is not a story a portal listing or a generic neighborhood guide will tell you, because none of it shows up in tax records or square footage. It shows up in a deed history and in local reporting that most buyers never think to search for.
Why there's no vacant land left, and what that does to price
Roslyn Country Club has been fully built out for decades. There are no empty lots. Every new house you see listed is a teardown-rebuild, and that mechanic has been driving the internal price spread inside this one pocket for a long time. Back in 2003, a Daniel Gale Real Estate manager quoted in local coverage of the club dispute put the range at roughly $650,000 for an older, untouched house up to $2.6 million for new construction on the same size lot, same streets, same school lines.
That gap has only widened. Listings marketed under the Country Club tag right now, including a 4,600 square foot new build on Parkway Drive, carry a median asking price near $1.85 million as a group. Meanwhile Roslyn Heights as a whole, per Zillow's tracking through June 2026, carries an average home value of $1,428,010, up 5.9% over the prior year. The country club premium isn't really paying for a club. It's paying for a rebuilt or buildable lot in a neighborhood where the raw land hasn't changed hands as a vacant parcel in half a century.
The school district line runs through the middle of the subdivision
Here's the part that catches people off guard during a search. Roslyn Country Club listings will describe the same pocket neighborhood as being in the Roslyn School District in one listing and the East Williston School District, feeding into Wheatley School, in another. Both are accurate. Most of Roslyn Heights falls under Roslyn Union Free School District, but smaller sections, including part of Roslyn Country Club, fall under East Williston and Herricks. The water utility follows a similar patchwork: homes north of the Northern State Parkway are served by the Roslyn Water District, the band between the parkway and Wheatley Hills Golf Club runs on the Albertson Water District, and a small strip of the golf club draws from East Williston's municipal system.
None of this is visible from the street. Two houses on the same block, both marketed as Roslyn Country Club, can sit in different school districts and different water districts. If a specific district assignment is part of your decision, confirm it against the parcel, not the subdivision name.
The bigger reason none of this ever got resolved
It helps to know that Roslyn Heights itself has no village government to arbitrate any of this. It's an unincorporated hamlet, governed directly by the Town of North Hempstead, and the Roslyn Country Club section specifically tried twice to break away and incorporate on its own, once in the 1950s over a desire for home rule and again in the 1960s over dissatisfaction with the county's plans to widen Roslyn Road. Both attempts failed. The neighborhood has been under direct town governance ever since, with no local zoning board or village council of its own to fast-track a resolution to the clubhouse dispute or anything else. That absence of local control is a large part of why a single-property legal fight was able to stretch across three town administrations without a final answer.
What to check before you write an offer
If you're looking at a house tagged Country Club or anywhere else in Roslyn Heights, a few questions are worth asking directly rather than assuming:
- Does this specific parcel's deed include the original Levitt easement language, or was it added or dropped in a later resale
- Which school district does the parcel fall under, Roslyn, East Williston, or Herricks, confirmed against the current district map rather than the listing description
- Which water district serves the property
- If the house is a recent teardown-rebuild, what was the lot's prior assessed value versus its current asking price, since that spread tells you how much of the number is land versus structure
A construction-literate advisor can walk a title report and a survey with you before you're emotionally attached to a specific address, which is a better time to find any of this out than during attorney review.
A few straight answers
Is the Roslyn Country Club clubhouse open right now? Based on the most recent public account from the neighborhood's own community association, the property remains privately held and the club has not reopened since its 2007 closure.
Does every home in the pocket have guaranteed access rights? Only parcels tracing back to the original Levitt sales carry the 1959 easement language. A title search on the specific property is the only way to confirm it, not the listing description.
Does the unresolved club status affect resale value? It hasn't stopped homes from selling at a premium relative to the rest of Roslyn Heights, but it does mean the premium is tied to lot and construction quality rather than to a functioning amenity, which is worth factoring into your own resale expectations.
If you're weighing a purchase in Roslyn Heights, Roslyn Country Club, or anywhere else along the North Shore where the listing language and the deed history don't quite match, Dalia Elison can walk the title, the district lines, and the construction history with you before you're the one holding the easement question. Schedule a Confidential Consultation to start with the facts specific to the address, not the subdivision name.
