Now we’ll head downstate, to Staten Island and another altered symbol: the borough flag. Nobody is taking to the streets in protest, but the borough president, James Oddo, actively disliked a banner that was created in 1971. It showed birds flying above a big hill, along with wavy blue lines representing the island’s surrounding waters. Sounds bucolic, no?

Not to Mr. Oddo. The slope reminded him of the unlamented Fresh Kills landfill, where New York City dumped its solid waste until the landfill closed in March 2001. (It was temporarily reopened after the Sept. 11 attacks so that rubble from the World Trade Center could be sorted.) The birds looked to Mr. Oddo like sea gulls ready to feast on garbage. “I always thought it was ugly,” he said of the flag.

The landfill reinforced, physically, a feeling shared by many Staten Islanders that they are dumped on, metaphorically and politically, by the rest of the city. “The forgotten borough” is one of their favored self-descriptions. Resentments boiled over in 1993 when they voted by a margin of nearly two to one to secede from New York City. The secession drive — these days some might try calling it Stexit — ended up dying in the State Assembly.

Mr. Oddo and a senior adviser, Emil Micha, came up with a new flag, which The Staten Island Advance reported last week had finally found favor at City Hall. It revives an old borough seal, the dominant feature being a female figure holding a shield and a downward-pointed sword. She looks out on the Narrows, where two vessels can be seen, one of them Henry Hudson’s ship, the Half Moon. (An old yarn has it that the borough got its name when a crewman on the Half Moon saw a land mass and excitedly asked, “ ’Sdat an island?” Actually, with the Netherlands paying his way, Hudson called it Staaten Eylandt — Dutch for States Island.)