Bell Top School

The DeFreest Homestead is a historic house and barn located in the Rensselaer Technology Park in North Greenbush, New York, United States. The homestead and surrounding land are owned and managed by Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. It was the original home of Philip DeFreest, one of the first Dutch settlers to arrive in the mid-18th century. The land includes historic buildings typical of a working Dutch farm: a farmhouse restored in 1984 to house the park's administrative offices, and a Dutch barn. The DeFreest House was built around 1765, partially constructed of European brick used as ballast in Dutch fur trading ships that sailed up the Hudson. Between 1630 and 1850, Dutch barns dominated the landscape in the Hudson Valley. They were distinguished by their H-shaped structural frame. The DeFreest barn was constructed around 1820 of thick, 50-foot beams of hemlock more than a hundred years old when hewn, and wood re-used from earlier structures on the site. The house and surrounding homestead were listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1977. The DeFreest Homestead has been the interest of honorary trustee C. Sheldon Roberts (RPI class of 1948), and wife, Patricia. Roberts was one of the founders of Fairchild Semiconductor.A donation from the Roberts family allowed for a renovation to make the historic barn into a modern classroom for local schoolchildren.Patricia Roberts recalls, “I can remember first seeing the DeFreest House at the end of a muddy path and realizing that it must be saved in order to preserve our past but also, as importantly, to become the centerpiece of the Technology Park. We also recognized that the nearby Dutch barn could serve a similar purpose by preserving some of its history and giving it a new purpose — to become a launch pad for our children’s future.”

The Rensselaer Technology Park is a technology park in North Greenbush, New York, USA (though with a mailing address in Troy) operated by Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. As of 2009 the park has over 70 tenants representing a diverse range of technologies and employing over 2,400. The park is located along the Hudson River approximately five miles south of the RPI campus.

Sharpe Homestead and Cemetery is a historic home and cemetery located at Defreestville in Rensselaer County, New York. The house was built about 1740 and is a 1+1⁄2-story rectangular frame dwelling, 20 feet by 40 feet, topped by a steeply pitched gable roof covered with standing seam metal. It rests on a low fieldstone foundation. The family cemetery contains approximately a dozen stones marking the graves of the Sharpe and Barringer families.It was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2005.

The Center for Computational Innovations (CCI), (formerly the Computational Center for Nanotechnology Innovations) is a supercomputing center located at the Rensselaer Technology Park in Troy, New York.

John Evert Van Alen House is a historic home located at Defreestville in Rensselaer County, New York. The house was built between 1793 and 1794 and is a two-story, five-bay wide, room and a half deep, frame dwelling with a two-story, three-bay wide addition in the Federal style. The addition dates to about 1840–1854. It is sheathed in clapboards and is topped by a gable roof. Also on the property is a contributing L-shaped barn and the Van Alen family burial ground. The original owner John Evert Van Alen served in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1793 to 1799.It was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2004.

MapInfo Corporation, initially incorporated as Navigational Technologies Incorporated, was a company that developed location intelligence software. It was headquartered in North Greenbush, New York. Its products included a desktop mapping application, various map and demographic data products, and some web-based applications. It acquired several other companies in order to market their software, data, or services directly. It was acquired in 2007 by Pitney Bowes, and became Precisely in December 2019 when acquired by Syncsort.

North Greenbush is a town in Rensselaer County, New York, United States. North Greenbush is located in the western part of the county. The population was 13,292 at the 2020 census. The town has three main hamlets, Wynantskill in the northeastern corner, Defreestville in the southern portion of the town, and Snyder's Lake which occupies the majority of the town's eastern end. Each have strong identities and hinder efforts by the town to have a centralized identity. Also hindering a unified town image is that North Greenbush consists of parts of four different school districts, only one of which (a one-room schoolhouse) carries the town's name; two fire departments (Wynantskill and Defreestville); and three ZIP codes (City of Troy, City of Rensselaer, and Wynantskill). North Greenbush is home to the southern part of the Hudson Valley Community College (HVCC) campus, including the Joseph L. Bruno Stadium, home to the Tri-City ValleyCats minor league baseball team; the RPI Tech Park; the La Salle Institute; the New York State National Guard Armory, headquarters for the Rainbow Division; and various Rensselaer County government institutions.

Joseph Bruno Stadium is a stadium located on the campus of Hudson Valley Community College in Troy, New York. It is the home field of the Tri-City ValleyCats minor league baseball team of the independent Frontier League and previously the New York–Penn League. Located in the center of the tri-city area of New York's Capital Region (Albany, Schenectady and Troy), it was named after former New York State Senate Majority Leader Joseph Bruno, who helped secure the funds for the ballpark.

Hudson Valley Community College is a public community college in Troy, New York. It is part of the State University of New York (SUNY). Although about eighty percent of the students are from the Capital District, the remainder are from other parts of New York, other states and from some 30 countries around the world. The college is accredited by the Middle States Commission on Higher Education and is overseen by a 10-member Board of Trustees. The school has an enrollment of 9,300 students.

New York State Route 915E (NY 915E) is an unsigned reference route designation for Third Avenue Extension in East Greenbush, located in Rensselaer County, New York, in the United States. The east–west highway extends for 1.67 miles (2.69 km) from an intersection with NY 151 east of the Rensselaer city limits to a junction with U.S. Route 4 (US 4) south of the hamlet of Defreestville. NY 915E was designated as New York State Route 381 from the late 1930s to 1962 and part of NY 43 from that time to the late 1990s, when it gained its current designation.

The Manor of Rensselaerswyck, Manor Rensselaerswyck, Van Rensselaer Manor, or just simply Rensselaerswyck (Dutch: Rensselaerswijck Dutch pronunciation: [ˈrɛnsəlaːrsˌʋɛik]), was the name of a colonial estate—specifically, a Dutch patroonship and later an English manor—owned by the van Rensselaer family that was located in the area that would later become the Capital District of New York in the United States. The estate was originally deeded by the Dutch West India Company in 1630 to Kiliaen van Rensselaer, a Dutch merchant and one of the company's original directors. Rensselaerswyck extended for miles on each side of the Hudson River. It included most of the land that would later become New York counties of Albany and Rensselaer, as well as parts of Columbia and Greene counties. Under the terms of the patroonship, the patroon had nearly total jurisdictional authority, establishing civil and criminal law, villages, and a church (in part to record vital records, which were not kept by the state until the late 19th century). Tenant farmers were allowed to work on the land, but had to pay rent to the owners and had no property rights. In addition, the van Rensselaers harvested timber from the property. The patroonship was maintained intact by van Rensselaer descendants for more than two centuries. At the time of his death in 1839, Steven van Rensselaer III's land holdings made him the tenth-richest American in history. His son Stephen Van Rensselaer IV, the 10th and last patroon, received the bulk of his holdings; son William received some lands east of the Hudson. Following the death of Steven van Rensselaer III, tenant farmers began protesting the manor system. Under financial, judicial, and political pressure from this anti-rent movement, Stephen IV and William van Rensselaer sold off most of their land, ending the patroonship in the 1840s. For length of operations, the van Rensselaer patroonship was the most successful patroonship established under the West India Company system.

The Menands Bridge, officially known as the Troy-Menands Bridge, is a four-span through truss bridge that carries New York State Route 378 across the Hudson River in New York connecting Menands with Troy. Built in 1933, the crossing is supported by concrete piers and - even though it was designed and constructed at the end of the first third of the 20th century - was originally fitted with a lift section to accommodate tall ships. The section's lifting device was removed in 1966, but the elevating towers remained until their removal in the summer of 2000. Today the bridge has a clearance over the water of 66 feet (20 m), and a horizontal clearance between spans of 317 feet (97 m).