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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 difficulty New Yorkers have in identifying their city’s flag. Independent groups like the North American Vexillological Association (a group who studies flags) have also failed to rank New York City’s banner anywhere near the top in their rankings of well-designed city flags, as NYC's flag fails to heed their advice that flags should be simple enough so that a child could draw it from memory and that flags should never use lettering or seals. Podcaster and flag-enthusast Roman Mars even highlights our flag in his much-watched TED talk on the subject while saying “there is a scourge of bad flags, and they must be stopped."
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). 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.
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. Centrally positioned on the flag is the city seal. Those who study what makes flags successful often malign this lazy layout as a “seal on a bedsheet." A flag with a seal isn't always bad, but NYC's is a crowded design of animals, human figures, and colonial objects.
On the right side of the centrally placed seal is a Native American man in a breechcloth and eagle-feather headdress, holding onto a bow. While the heritage of New York’s tribes is an indispensable part of the city's identity, the rendition on the seal relies on a simplistic, stereotypical trope. It fails to accurately represent the region's original inhabitants, such as the Canarsee, the Munsee, and the broader Lenape Nation, either now or in pre-colonial times.
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 past. He stands peacefully on a olive branch, which promotes an inaccurate and sanitized view of a difficult colonial history during which residents of what's now New York were violently pushed out of their homeland.
Across from and contrasting with the Native American is a European fully dressed in traditional Dutch sailor 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 include an item that could be misidentified as a symbol of racial terror?
Floating behind the Dutchman is a cross. While often misinterpreted as a symbol of Christianity, it is instead intended to illustrate 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 from a very Eurocentric perspective.
Dutchmen like the one depicted on the seal were barely a majority of early European settlers. From its earliest days, the harbor was a diverse, multilingual hub where Portuguese, Germans, French, Swedes, Brits, and Ashkenazim mingled with both free and enslaved Africans, alongside members of tribes like the Lenape and the 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. Symbols of both Dutch and native cultures could still also be included in a redesign, just perhaps ones that are less cartoonishly reductive.
The two beavers inside the shield held by the two men on the flag are included not because beavers were 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 have the city's waterways been restored and protected enough for the species to return, as beavers were spotted back in the Bronx River starting in 2007.
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 effort in self-dealing, as it 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 at the expense of farmers in the Bronx, Brooklyn, Queens, Staten Island, up the Hudson Valley, and 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. Until 1977, the seal featured the year 1664, which was when the English captured the New Amsterdam. That changed under City Council President Paul O'Dwyer, an Irish-born politician with a deep distaste for British imperialism. He pushed to honor the Dutch settlement instead. However, rather than 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 issued blueprints 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.
So what can we do?
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.
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