New Amsterdam Becomes a City
On this day · 2 February 1653
On a Dutch holy day in 1653, a tiny fur-trading post at Manhattan's tip won the charter that would one day make it New York.
On February 2, 1653, Director-General Peter Stuyvesant granted New Amsterdam a municipal charter, transforming the Dutch West India Company’s fur-trading outpost on the southern tip of Manhattan into a self-governing city. The date was no accident: it fell on Candlemas Day, the traditional day on which Dutch magistrates were sworn into office back in the old Amsterdam.
The new government echoed the Netherlands’ own. Authority passed to a schout (a sheriff-and-prosecutor), two burgomasters (roughly mayors), and five schepens (aldermen) — officials who doubled as the city’s lower court. Within days they claimed the former City Tavern as their City Hall.
The Dutch Republic had agreed to let the colonists run their own affairs, the fruit of years of petitioning against Stuyvesant’s heavy hand.
The charter lasted barely a decade under Dutch rule. In 1664 the English seized the colony and renamed it New York, yet the municipal framework forged in 1653 became the seed of the modern city’s government.
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