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New York is an important city. The city is the home of the UN and global finance, it is a cultural and culinary juggernaut, and its residents speak more different languages than any settlement in known human history. A city of this magnitude deserves an important flag. Good flags inspire pride and help bind together a community. New York City does not have a good flag. The major evidence for this is the inability of New Yorkers to identify their city’s flag, but also independent groups like the North American Vexillological Association (a group who studies flags) have failed to rank New York City’s banner in their top hundred in their rankings of good city flags. There, towns like Tulsa, Reno, Duluth, or Spokane regularly beat it out in terms of flag design.
Cities with great flags love to show them off. Chicago and Washington, D.C., have superb flags, and they are featured on municipal buses, taxi cabs, hats, shirts, and all sorts of merchandise in their tourist shops. Residents of those cities even wear them on their bodies as tattoos. New York City’s flag is remarkably absent from vendors’ stalls in Times Square and the Battery (and if any New Yorkers have a tattoo of the full city flag, do be in touch, we have questions). And in cities proud of their flag, when a police officer dies in the line of duty, their casket is often draped in that flag, rather than the American flag, an honor not typically bestowed on New York City’s flag. The NYPD actually have a very good flag of their own that serves this purpose.
We believe there are two steps to improving the city flag. First, the city should remove the seal from the flag. The seal is a relic of colonialism, and while adopting a new seal that represents NYC in the 21st century and beyond is a worthy goal, taking the current one off the flag would greatly reduce how much it and its dubious symbolism are used to represent city institutions. We feel that is a healthy place to start. Once we have opened up a space both on the flag and in the minds of New Yorkers that a new symbol and new flag can work for us, then we aim to follow the process that the city of Syracuse used in 2023 to replace their city’s banner with one that its citizens and council approved of.
New York City’s current flag is a tricolor of blue, white, and orange with the civic seal placed centrally in blue on the white bar. The colors blue and orange, though derived from the Dutch colonial flag, have found a resonance with New Yorkers. Fans of the Knicks, Mets, and Islanders all proudly wear them as their teams’ colors, which can also be found representing college programs like Syracuse University or several SUNY and CUNY schools. Some cities' flags include their do city seal, but might be derided as “seals on a bedsheet” by those who study what makes some flags more successful than others. A flag with a seal isn't always bad, but NYC's is a crowded design of animals, human figures, and colonial objects.
The first element many commenters on the flag notice is the Native American man in a breechcloth and eagle-feather headdress holding onto a bow. While the heritage of New York’s native tribes is important and worth highlighting, this depiction relies on a simplistic, stereotypical trope rather than an accurate historical representation, either pre-colonial or now, of the region's real indigenous people, like the Leni Lenape, Canarsee, and other tribes of the larger Delaware Nation.
Joe Baker, of the Lenape Center, has called the depiction "cartoonish" and criticized the reductive nature of the design. Putting the individual in a breechcloth also emphasizes his primitiveness, freezing the Native American figure in a mythical, sanitized past that glosses over the fact that the first residents of what's now New York were violently pushed out of their own homeland. If New Yorkers wanted to symbolically honor the original human inhabitants of the land, many Lenape groups have utilized the symbol of a native turtle in their own flags.
Across from and contrasting with the Native American is a European dressed in traditional Dutch-Protestant clothes of the 17th century. The Dutchman holds a teardrop-shaped weight on a long rope, called a plummet, which would have been used by European sailors in early New York to measure the rough depth of the water they were in. Unfortunately, some New Yorkers have seen the item in his hand as a noose. This misinterpretation is perhaps due in part to the rudimentary drawing, which is itself a larger issue. Regardless of intent, it raises a serious question: should a flag featuring a white settler and an indigenous man include an item that could be misidentified as a symbol of racial terror?
Behind the Dutchman is a cross. While often misinterpreted as a symbol of Christianity, it is instead intended to symbolize a cross-staff, again a tool that sailors would use for navigation. By equipping the sailor with tools of global exploration, the seal implicitly glorifies the arrival of settlers as the "discovery" of the land, entirely from a Eurocentric perspective.
Protestant Dutchmen were barely a majority of early European settlers, and ceased to be soon into the history of colonial New Amsterdam, where Portuguese, Germans, French, Belgians, Swedes, Brits, Ashkenazim, as well as those formerly and still enslaved, often from Angola, all mingled with the Lenape, Canarsee, Esopus, Iroquois, and Mohawk. It can also be noted that both figures are clearly male, the same gender that all 73 members of the Board of Aldermen who set the current design in 1915 were. Together the two figures stand in peace, which promotes an inaccurate and sanitized view of a difficult colonial history. Symbols of both Dutch and native cultures could still also be included in a redesign, just perhaps one that are less cartoonishly reductive.
The two beavers are included not because it was an animal beloved by colonists or honored by native tribes, but because it was harvested en masse during the colonial era for its valuable fur, a symbol of a troublesome exploitative environmental legacy that heavily disrupted the existing economies, territories, and way of life. The beaver's skin was turned into hats for sale in European capitals until the animal was over-hunted from the state. Only recently has the species and the city's waterways been protected enough to return to the five boroughs, with an handful of beavers spotted in the Bronx River starting in 2007, but so far nowhere else.
The windmill sails and flour barrels honor the "Bolting Act" of 1678, an English decree that granted New York City a highly lucrative monopoly on milling wheat and packing flour for export. This was, however, a serious effort in self-dealing, since this was a gift from British King Charles II to his younger brother, James, the Duke of York, who at that time ran the colony like his personal real estate and business venture. The monopoly massively enriched a small cartel of Manhattan merchants, millers, and bakers and was, it needs to be mentioned, at the expense of farmers in the Bronx, Brooklyn, Queens, Staten Island, up the Hudson Valley, or even in Manhattan outside of the city, which was then limited to the southern tip of the island. Growers in those places had to send grain into the city to be processed, where it was often packed into those flour barrels and loaded for export abroad by enslaved Africans.
The date 1625 has a host of problems. The date featured here was 1664 until 1977, but that year, the City Council President was Paul O'Dwyer, an Irish-born politician who despised the fact that the seal celebrated 1664, the year the English captured the city. He wanted to change it to reflect the original Dutch settlement, a group who had, like the Irish, fought the British Empire. However, instead of choosing 1624 (the arrival of the first group of people transported by the Dutch) or 1626 (the establishment of the Dutch-run outpost on Manhattan Island), his committee essentially split the difference. They chose 1625, the year the Dutch bureaucrats in Europe gave permission for the city’s fort. As Historian Russell Shorto and others point out, this means the official seal of New York City commemorates the mailing out of a corporate memo.
Any 17th-century date, again it can be noted, emphasizes the idea that a place’s history only begins with the arrival of Europeans, and any settling that happened in the area before then merits little to no consequence. The obvious answer though, if Paul O'Dwyer didn't want to honor the English takeover of his city, was perhaps to remove the year altogether, which could still improve the situation.
Though excluded from the version on the flag, the seal is surrounded by the Latin text “Sigillum Civitatis Novi Eboraci” circles the seal and the words translate as “The Seal the City of New York.” The last word is the genitive case of Eboracum, which was the name the Romans who conquered Britain created from the Celtic name that meant "place of the yew trees" for the settlement at the strategic confluence of the River Ouse and the River Foss. However, the name York comes from Jórvík, the Viking name for their settlement that in turn derived from an Anglo-Saxon name meaning "wild-boar town." While the Roman settlement was centered on the walled fort, the Viking town was more focused around the nearby riverfront markets. So, by putting Novi Eboraci on the seal, the city isn't actually translating "New York" into Latin. They are technically calling it "New Yew-Tree Place," using a dead Roman word that has very limited linguistic connection to the modern English word "York," aside from geography.
Besides using Latin, a language understood in early New York only by certain elites, the text perpetuates the idea that the city and state are named after the city of York in Northumbria, which they are not. New York’s naming instead comes from the main title of James Stuart, the Duke of York. Among his other duties, James was the governor and largest shareholder of the Royal African Company (RAC), which held a monopoly on the English slave trade. Under his leadership, the RAC trafficked more enslaved African men, women, and children across the Atlantic than any other single institution in history. He literally branded the letters "DY" (Duke of York) onto the skin of enslaved people.
By translating his title into a dead Roman language on the official seal, the city gives his legacy an unearned aura of classical dignity and prestige. The phrase Sigillum Civitatis Novi Eboraci sanitizes the namesake. It allows modern New Yorkers to look at the seal and think of ancient Britannia or classical history, rather than forcing them to confront the fact that their city and state are named after one of the most brutal human traffickers of the 17th century. If a seal must feature a historic name in another language, the Lenape term Lenapehoking more accurately serves the purpose.
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