“I doubt the English see this as something to carry on about, particularly at a moment of the Scotch independence drive,” he said. “I’m trying to imagine what it would look like: a re-enactment of British ships threatening to bombard the Wall Street area? But nothing actually happened, not a shot fired, except for Peter Stuyvesant’s temper tantrum. Not sparky stuff.

“Lowering a Dutch flag somewhere and raising a British one instead? Doesn’t set the pulse a-pounding.”

Image Paul O'Dwyer, the Irish-born and Anglophobic president of the New York City Council, was behind having the “1664” expunged from the city’s seal and flag and replaced with 1625, to coincide with the arrival of the Dutch. Credit... William E. Sauro/The New York Times

Nor, apparently, did the anniversary inspire much celebration in the past.

In 1914, New York City chose not to commemorate its 250th birthday, instead honoring the 300th anniversary of the chartering of the New Netherlands Company. In 1964, fewer than 300 people showed up at Bowling Green for a party put on by the Mayor’s Committee for the 300th Anniversary of the Founding of the City of New York. The mayor, Robert F. Wagner Jr., was not among them; however, a George Washington look-alike was.

This year, the typically undemonstrative British have no plans to honor the occasion, perhaps mindful that in 1673 they proved no better at defending Manhattan when the Dutch attacked and that a little over a century later they were kicked out of the country altogether.

The events that led to the Dutch surrender essentially began on March 22, 1664, when King Charles II gifted the territory between the Delaware and Connecticut Rivers, in return for four beaver pelts a year, to his younger brother James, Duke of York, a rival of the Dutch West India Company in the slave trade. (Then, without telling James, the king gave away what would become New Jersey to two confederates.)

By July, New Amsterdam’s 1,500 inhabitants had been roiled by fears of a surprise, unprovoked invasion. Seeking to inherit an intact town, a 23-point Articles of Capitulation drawn up by a British colonel, Richard Nicolls, offered the Dutch guarantees of religious and other freedoms, provisions that would preserve their customs and contracts, and a pledge that “all public Houses shall continue for the uses, which now they are for,” referring to bars.