New York’s Birth Date: Don’t Go by City’s Seal

NY Times ^ | July 14, 2008 | SAM ROBERTS

[Pharmboy]

For decades, the proud seal of New York City, with its depiction of a sailor and a Manhattan Indian, of beavers and flour barrels and the sails of a windmill, has celebrated 1625 as the year the city was founded.

There’s just one problem: Most historians say the year has hardly any historical significance.

The first settlers arrived in what would become part of New York City on a Dutch ship as early as 1623; some say 1624. The Dutch “purchased” Manhattan in 1626. The first charter was granted in 1653.

And the most notable event of 1625? Dutch settlers moved their cattle to Lower Manhattan from Governors Island.

“It is simply wrong,” Michael Miscione, the Manhattan borough historian, said of 1625 as the city’s birth date. “The first founding settlers of New York City landed here in 1624.”

snip...

Nobody complained much about the date until 1974, when Paul O’Dwyer, the Irish-born and Anglophobic president of the City Council, figured that the 700th anniversary of the founding of Amsterdam in the Netherlands was as good a time as any to strip the British of the distinction of having founded the city and bestow it instead on the Dutch.

snip...

But some scholars apparently persuaded Mr. O’Dwyer that if the pretext was to honor the Dutch contribution, 1624 might be difficult to justify. The first settlers who arrived in 1624 in the Dutch West India Company ship Nieuw Amsterdam were mostly Walloons from Belgium, who had sought asylum in the Netherlands from religious persecution during the Spanish Inquisition. (A 1623 provincial seal refers in Latin to “New Belgium.”) Also, many moved on to Albany.

[neverdem]

BTTT!