Rensselaer, New York

Rensselaer sits directly across the Hudson River from Albany, connected to the state capital by the Dunn Memorial Bridge, and its history is inseparable from that position. The land was originally part of Rensselaerswyck, the enormous Dutch patroonship granted to Kiliaen van Rensselaer in sixteen thirty, a land grant so vast it surrounded Albany on three sides and persisted as a feudal landholding arrangement long after the Dutch lost the colony to the English. The city of Rensselaer was chartered in eighteen ninety-seven, when the village of Greenbush became a city, and it later annexed Bath-on-Hudson and part of East Greenbush in nineteen oh two.

Its economy was built on rail yards and river commerce: the New York Central Railroad's classification yards here were among the busiest in the northeast for much of the twentieth century, sorting freight cars bound up and down the Hudson Valley and east toward New England. The rail yards still operate, though on a fraction of their former scale, and Rensselaer station is today the Albany stop for Amtrak trains running between New York City and Montreal.