New York City flies a Dutch flag. Not the current red, white, and blue of the Netherlands, but the older orange, white, and blue Prince's Flag that Dutch ships wore in 1625, the year the West India Company made New Amsterdam the capital of New Netherland. Turn the stripes vertical, stamp the municipal seal in blue on the middle band, and you have the flag the five boroughs have used since 1915. For a city that spent barely forty years under Dutch rule and more than a century under English rule, it is a pointed choice of ancestor.
Dutch colors, English arms, American crest
The flag was invented for an English anniversary. In 1915 the city marked 250 years since the installation of its first mayor under English rule, and a blue-ribbon committee was formed to give New York a proper flag for the occasion. The committee worked with the New-York Historical Society, digging through seals and standards from both the Dutch and English periods, and landed on a hybrid it described with unusual candor: "the colors are Dutch, the arms are English, the crest is distinctively American, but the flag as such is the flag of the City."
The Board of Aldermen approved it on April 6, 1915, and the flag was first shown publicly on June 24. The design has barely moved since. Today it is fixed in Section 2-103 of the Administrative Code: orange, white, and blue "in perpendicular bars of equal dimensions," blue nearest the flagstaff, with the standard design of the city seal in blue on the middle bar. The code specifies that the seal's Latin legend be omitted on the flag, a detail the city itself does not always honor; official renderings with the motto intact are easy to find.
The seal, item by item
The seal is a compressed history of why the city exists. At its center are the four sails of a windmill, set saltire-wise, with a beaver in the upper and lower quarters and a flour barrel in each side quarter. The beavers are the fur trade, the business that brought the Dutch West India Company to the Hudson in the first place. The windmill and barrels recall the Bolting Act era of the 1670s and 1680s, when New York held a legal monopoly on milling and exporting flour and grew wealthy on it.
Flanking the shield are two supporters: a sailor holding a plummet, for the Europeans who arrived by sea, and a Lenape man holding a bow, for the people who were already here. Above them, a bald eagle perches on a hemisphere. The eagle is the American part; before independence the same spot held an English imperial crown, and swapping crown for eagle was the young republic's edit. Below is the date, 1625, and around the full seal runs the legend Sigillum Civitatis Novi Eboraci, "Seal of the City of New York." Eboracum was the Roman name for York, which makes the seal a Latin translation of an English name for a Dutch town.
1664 becomes 1625
For its first six decades the flag's seal read 1664, the year an English fleet took New Amsterdam without a shot and renamed it for the Duke of York. On December 30, 1977, that changed. Paul O'Dwyer, the Irish-born president of the City Council and no admirer of British empire, championed legislation moving the date to 1625 to foreground the Dutch founding and push the English conquest offstage.
Historians have never been comfortable with the new number. The public historian at the New-York Historical Society has called 1625 "arbitrary." The Dutch chartered New Netherland's settlement in 1624, planted the Manhattan colony's fort in 1625 or 1626, bought the island (by the traditional account) in 1626, and granted New Amsterdam municipal government in 1653. Any of those years has a claim. Edwin G. Burrows, co-author of the Pulitzer-winning history Gotham, offered the most honest theory: 1625 conveniently beats Boston, founded in 1630. The date stands anyway, on every flag on every municipal building.
Variants for the mayor and the council
The plain flag belongs to the city at large, and two official variants mark its top offices. The mayor's flag adds an arc of five blue five-pointed stars above the seal, one per borough, and is made to a prescribed 33 by 44 inches. The City Council flies the flag with the word "Council" in capitals under the seal. Otherwise the tricolor is uniform, at 3:5 proportions, from City Hall to sanitation garages.
The colors have leaked far beyond government. Blue and orange are the official city colors, and they are the palette of the Knicks and the Mets, among others. When a New York team wears orange trim, it is quoting, knowingly or not, the house colors of a seventeenth-century Dutch prince.
What the flag skips
A flag built from a 1625 founding date and a fur-trade seal leaves things out, and critics have said so. The Lenape man on the seal has been discussed for decades; he is rendered as a generic figure, paired with a sailor in a composition that presents conquest as partnership, and campaigns to redesign the seal surface periodically. The flag also commemorates a company town founded for profit, which at least has the virtue of honesty. New Amsterdam was a business venture before it was anything else, and the beavers on the seal admit it. Four hundred years on, the city still flies the corporate colors.
References
[1] "Flags of New York City," Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flags_of_New_York_City
[2] "Seal of New York City," Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seal_of_New_York_City
[3] New York City Administrative Code, Section 2-103, "City flag."
[4] "New York City, New York (U.S.)," Flags of the World. https://www.crwflags.com/fotw/flags/us-nyc.html