51st State
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
City Council Member Peter Vallone Jr.’s revival of the idea that New York City should secede from New York State sent us scrambling to our bookshelf for Volume Eight of the Letters of Members of the Continental Congress edited by Edmund Burnett and issued by the Carnegie Corporation of Washington in 1936. The insight it yields is that New York’s state boundaries themselves are less than organic. They were disputed well into the late 1780s, nearly a decade after the Declaration of Independence.
Massachusetts had claims across its border with New York that were settled only by a Congressional commission, the members of which were themselves the topic of heated dispute between the two states. Vermont, not one of the original 13 colonies, was claimed by both New Hampshire and New York until it was admitted to the union in 1791.
In other words, there is nothing particularly sacrosanct about the boundaries of the Empire State. And if there were ever a reason to reexamine them, the news, underscored by Mayor Bloomberg in testimony in Albany on Monday, that the city pays in $11 billion more to the state government than it gets back in services sure qualifies.
Now, secession has a Confederate ring to it that makes us recoil. And it’s possible to take the logic to extremes — the Upper East Side probably pays more in taxes to New York City than it gets back in services, too, and no one would think of it seceding. Nor would New York think of seceding from America, though it pays far more to Washington than, by some measures, it gets back directly. Even so, if the secession issue helps the mayor extract more from the city in the budget negotiations with Albany, there’s a logic to raising it.
What the history indicates is that New York wouldn’t have to be a 51st state, but that the rest of the state could revert to the neighbors, while New York City remains New York, New York. Our own preference would be not a shrinking New York but an expanding one. We’d be happy to subsume, for example, Greenwich, Connecticut and Saddle River, New Jersey. And, for that matter, Puerto Rico. But the key would be to draw the borders to the advantage of New York City rather than to the advantage of Albany.
