ONE BIRTHDAY FOR ALL NEW YORKERS

September 11 will always be remembered as the day New York City was attacked by terrorist that rocked the very foundation of our beloved democracy. As we go about the business of healing and recognizing ALL those who perished on that fateful day, citizens and neighborhoods city-wide will be looking forward to the future, one where ALL New Yorkers begin to work together to rebuild our spirit and pride as the greatest city in world.

February 2, 2003 is Charter Day, a special birthday for New York City. On that date in 1653, there was a spontaneous holiday as citizens paraded down Broadway (originally “Heere Weg”) in celebration of Pieter Stuyvesant's grant to citizens of Nieuw Amsterdam of a Charter of Municipal Self-Government. For the first of time on this continent, perhaps indeed in the Western World, a startling idea was launched: people in a city might govern themselves. Where multiplicity was a birthright and which still stands around the world as the symbol of diversity.

Now, 350 years later, The New York City Birthday Committee has been formed to bring all businesses, communities and institutions to celebrate, once again, (in a city of scores of national and ethnic parades and celebrations), one day which is uniquely its own.

This year 2003, the city’s 350th anniversary, the Committee hopes that Charter Day will become New York’s official holiday, as grounded in the people's pride of their history as is Boston's citizens are, who annually celebrate Patriot's Day, remembering the Battle of Bunker Hill. That battle for self-government, which began the Revolutionary War, was 122 years after New York's Charter!

On future Charter Days, all over the City, New Yorkers will celebrate a unique heritage of joyous individualism, tolerance, self-esteem, and common endeavor -- characteristics that led writer Joan Didion to call New York "The Great Experiment."

President, Roland Rogers, who, concerned about the growing divisiveness, deteriorating values decided New Yorkers could be brought together in a common pride in a unique heritage, founded The New York City Birthday Committee. Along with other concerned citizens, they discovered a necessary, unifying, common ground in early history, in the Charter of Self-Government, and the values of religious freedom, multiplicity, and the habit of giving haven to all who came to live and work, which were established by the Dutch West India Company as good business and good sense.