Wantagh Railroad Museum

The Wantagh Museum centers on the village's 1885 Long Island Rail Road station, built to replace the original 1867 depot of the South Side Railroad of Long Island. When the LIRR's mid-twentieth-century rebuilding of the Babylon Branch — which elevated the line and replaced stations — and the railroad's broader practice of tearing down Victorian-era depots threatened the building, residents formed the Wantagh Preservation Society in 1965 to protect it. They could not keep the depot beside the tracks, but in 1966 it was relocated several blocks north, onto grounds once occupied by a neighborhood amusement park, with restoration finished in 1969. In 1972 the LIRR donated 'The Jamaica,' a 1912-built parlor car whose appointments included a solarium, a kitchen area, and ice-cooled air conditioning, and the grounds also hold a 1907-built shack that served as Wantagh's official post office until the mid-1920s, a diamond-shaped crossing sign predating the crossbuck era, and a vintage grade-crossing gate. The station opened to the public as a museum in 1982 and was added to the National Register of Historic Places, as the Wantagh Railroad Complex, on June 30, 1983.