Happy 400th birthday New York! Or 361st! Who’s to say?

2025 is shaping up to be quite a year for New York City. There’s going to be a mayoral primary, and barring a presidential intervention, a mayoral corruption trial. Congestion pricing is finally beginning, probably, maybe and on top of all that it’s New York’s 400th birthday. And you thought the Chambers Street J/M/Z stop was 500 years old at least.

Fittingly for the best city on Earth, Mayor Eric Adams announced on New Year’s Eve that the quadricentennial is a year-long celebration called Founded By NYC, a sprawling look at the city’s history since 1625 that will tell the story of the Big Apple and touch all our major cultural celebrations like the Museum Mile Festival, the city’s annual free summer movies and concerts and Summer Streets. If you want to make your mark on the city’s birthday celebration, you can submit your own events for listing on the Founded By NYC website if they spotlight one of these themes: historical significance, cultural impact, innovation and creativity, authentic storytelling, or sustainability and legacy.

Also fittingly for New York City in the 21st century, the party is brought to you by Hamilton and the city’s non-governmental official tourism corporation that once appointed Taylor Swift the city’s global welcome ambassador to celebrate the truly terrible “Welcome to New York.”

It’s going to be fun, inclusive, and will thankfully include the perspective of the Lenape people who lived in Manhattan before the Dutch got here, and there’s just one problem with the whole thing. No one can agree on how old New York City is.

Seriously. This isn’t me giving the mayor and NYC Tourism + Conventions, the city’s 501c(6) official destination marketing organization and convention and visitors bureau shit just because I can. It’s also not me trying to relitigate my mysterious tropical shirt inviting you to “catch the vibe” of New York City in 1895, which, as my exhaustive blog post went over, doesn’t match the reality that New York City became a city in 1898. For one thing, there’s a whole separate New York City anniversary organization, the New York Quadricentennial Committee, that argues the time to celebrate the 400th anniversary was either 2024 (whoops), 2025 or even 2026. 

But also take a look at the historical record, like this story about a small group celebrating the city’s tricentennial on Sept. 8, 1964. No, the mayor was not there, instead choosing to spend his time in Islip (really, Suffolk County? You’re a real rotten guy, Robert F. Wagner) but 280 people were there, among them someone dressed like George Washington. Famously, 1964 was a mere 61 years ago, which kind of messes up the whole idea of celebrating the quadricentennial in the correct time frame (100 years after the tricentennial). You can also still find merchandise from the 1964 World's Fair in Flushing Meadows Park that clearly was celebrating New York City’s 300th birthday.

The 280 or so people in Bowling Green had a good historical claim to their gathering. That year, 1964, marked 300 years since a British fleet sailed into the New York Harbor and Peter Stuyvesant, the Dutch governor of New Amsterdam, handed over Manhattan without a shot being fired. New Amsterdam was then named New York, which is of course what we call it now.

But did all those people in Bowling Green and the World's Fair also get it wrong? In 1953, no less an authority than the U.S. Postal Service issued commemorative stamps celebrating the city’s 300th anniversary, a full 11 years before a guy pretending to be George Washington sang us happy birthday in lower Manhattan. Those stamps were marking 300 years since Stuyvesant established a municipal government for New Amsterdam, so if you want to talk about New York as a city, it’s a reasonable place to start. Besides the stamps, it’s not a huge moment in the city’s popular imagination though.

Still, if people were celebrating 300 years of New York City in 1964, how are we celebrating 400 years of it just 61 years later? As with so many good causes, it all comes down to hating the English. In 1974, Irish-born City Council President Paul O’Dwyer began campaigning to change New York City’s seal, which listed 1664 as the year New York was established, to 1625, the year Dutch colonists first actually settled in lower Manhattan.

Despite the fact that historians (nerds) objected to the idea on the grounds that New Amsterdam was less a city and more a commercial outpost under Dutch rule, at least in 1625, O’Dwyer got his way in 1977 when the City Council passed a bill to officially change the seal and thus, make a monumental change to New York City’s official history. The news was a two-paragraph item at the bottom of a much longer story about the city approving a new graveyard in Tottenville.

As a quick aside: Seal and flag-fuckery didn’t disappear from New York politics after O’Dwyer’s triumph. In 2020, Andrew Cuomo decided it was very important to add “E pluribus unum” to the New York State flag and seal, in order to teach Donald Trump … something. Clearly, he learned whatever lesson Cuomo was trying to teach. Anyway.

Owing to O’Dwyer’s successful rejiggering of European history in New York City, noble as it was to spite the terrible English, we’re left with this problem of understanding how old the city is. Your interpretation will vary, I suppose. If America is inextricably linked to the English colonization, and New York City is part of America, it’s reasonable to insist “New York” began in 1664. 

Of course, it’s all well and good to want to separate ourselves from the hateful English and embrace New York’s roots as a crossroads of international trade and the tolerant mixing of many peoples, but considering the Dutch first imported African slaves to New Amsterdam in 1627, we shouldn’t exactly be onszelf een schouderklopje geven* simply for embracing our Dutch roots over our English ones. And even then, it’s unclear from even boosters of Dutch-based history as to when we’re supposed to be doing the big 40(0). Last year? This year? Next year?

I do admire O’Dwyer’s gambit, if only for the fact that if New York is a place where people have always come to reinvent themselves, it’s fitting for the city itself to shrug off the weight of history and simply make a new reality. If it’s good enough for Jay Gatsby (whose story really does turn 100 this year) and good enough for my great grandma Esther (who declared her birthday was now on George Washington’s birthday after she arrived in New York), it’s good enough for the rest of us.

Personally, I reject either anniversary date, though I’ll happily enjoy a full year of public events celebrating New York this year. For starters, the Lenape were here first, hanging out and engaging in their own customs and rhythms of life before Henry Hudson sailed down the river. And consider the following. In Ric Burns’ New York: A Documentary Film, narrator David Ogden Stiers explains that the first Dutch colonists in “Manahatta” thought the Native American word for the island meant one of two things: “island of hills” or “place of general inebriation.” If the latter was Manhattan’s reputation over 400 years before Hell Square was a gleam in a puking 23-year-old’s eye, New York may have just always been some form of New York, going back to the days of the primordial muck.

*This is Dutch for “patting ourselves on the back”