“It is a little sad, yet also somewhat inspiring, and in any event altogether fitting, that New York City is marking its 400th birthday this year and almost no one gives a damn. Last New Year’s Eve the mayor, Eric Adams, promised a year-long celebration, but denizens would be forgiven for not having detected many events so far. “They’re not doing squat,” says Kenneth Jackson, an emeritus professor of history at Columbia University and the editor-in-chief of “The Encyclopedia of New York City”.
Though disappointed, Mr Jackson is not surprised. “New York has never cared,” he says. As with other historians of New York, the only thing that seems to make him wistful about Boston (a younger city, he notes) is its fascination with its past. Russell Shorto, another historian, says New York “just keeps paving over things”.
It probably does not help that New Yorkers tend to be fractious, and even the history of commemorating the history of New York is ripe for disputation. Just 61 years ago the World’s Fair in Queens celebrated the city’s 300th birthday. Back then the city recognised as its foundational year 1664, when the British seized New Amsterdam from the Dutch and renamed it after the Duke of York. But in 1974 Paul O’Dwyer, the president of the city council, moved to backdate the year displayed on the municipal flag from 1664 to 1625. O’Dwyer, who spoke with the lilt of his native Ireland, insisted he was just out to respect history. The mayor at the time, Abraham Beame, went along with the idea, though one city hall aide dismissed it as “Paul O’Dwyer’s attempt to make us a Dutch city instead of an English one”.
Other possible dates might have included 1609, when Henry Hudson, an English captain exploring under a Dutch flag, sailed up the river that now bears his name; or 1624, when the Dutch West India Company landed settlers—eight of them—on what is now called Governors Island, in New York’s harbour; or 1626, when the settlers notoriously “bought” Manhattan for what was later judged to be a few dollars’ worth of stuff. The year 1625, Mr Shorto says, was “when they sent over shipments of farm animals”.
New York’s historians care less about the date than that New Yorkers should pause to consider how their city vaulted to global pre-eminence from that tiny toehold in the harbour. “What’s important is not whether it started in 1625,” Mr Jackson says impatiently. “It’s just that something happened here, and then became the headquarters of finance and culture and arts and media and just about everything else you can think of.”
O’Dwyer was ahead of his time. Just as he moved to backdate the founding, a new wave of scholarship was starting to reckon with the profound imprint of the Dutch on New York, and on America. Until then New York’s story was seen through an Anglocentric lens, in part because English-speakers told the story and the settlement’s early documents were written in 17th-century Dutch, which few alive could understand. As historians set to work translating documents from New York’s first decades, a picture came into focus of how radically different the Dutch town was from other settlements in the New World.
While the theocrats in Boston were hanging Quakers to create a Puritan monoculture apart from the world, the Dutch were haphazardly fostering a polyglot society united largely by a shared interest in being left alone to make money.
The amphibious Dutch immediately saw the potential in New York’s intricate tracery of waterways: the deep harbour, the protected passage eastward through Long Island Sound, and, most of all, the Hudson’s reach to the north, where a valley opened westward to the continent’s vast interior (and where the Erie canal would eventually join New York by water to Detroit and Milwaukee). In 1640, after the Dutch company gave up its monopoly and declared the port a free-trade zone, New Amsterdam became a hub for Atlantic trade. By 1645 a visiting Jesuit reported hearing 18 languages among the few hundred residents (and he probably did not count African and native languages). “Everyone here is a trader,” a resident observed in 1650.
That trade was partly in human beings, a satanic legacy of Dutch commerce. Yet the society in those first years also included free black property owners and women who ran trading companies as well as Portuguese, Bohemians, Arabs, Poles and Mohawks. Even Jews were tolerated, if reluctantly.
Going Dutch
The English saw what was happening and coveted not just the port but its culture. This is the subject of “Taking Manhattan”, Mr Shorto’s latest, fascinating history based partly on the continuing work on Dutch documents. The Stuart monarchy had just returned to the throne, overcoming a Puritan Commonwealth, and the king wanted to bring the righteous Puritan colonies to heel. But when an overwhelming English naval force menaced New Amsterdam in 1664, the commander, Richard Nicholls, negotiated an agreement that, in Mr Shorto’s telling, was less like a surrender than a merger or bill of rights. It guaranteed the residents their rights to property and to keep trading and worshipping freely. It even let them retain an unusual freedom they had won under the Dutch, to choose their own municipal leaders.
“That sets up this dynamic of two ideological power bases in colonial America with very different ways of seeing the world,” Mr Shorto says. “And you can look at a lot of American history as this, you know, back-and-forth between these two, the one based in New York, remaining outward-looking and business-minded and globally oriented.” The other, originally based in Boston, “is puritanical and Christian and America-first. And that’s part of the DNA of the country.” Not just New York, but America, should be celebrating, and pondering, this particular birthday.” [1]
1. Making it there. The Economist; London Vol. 456, Iss. 9463, (Aug 30, 2025): 34.
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