Happy Evacuation Day!



George Washington’s triumphal entry into New York City on Evacuation Day, Nov. 25, 1783, as depicted in an 1879 lithograph. (Image: Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division)

You are all probably still recuperating from your Turkey Dinner with all the trimmings but today is yet another American Holiday, albeit long forgotten by most of us, but still worth noting.  

228 years ago today, the last British Red Coats left from a longboat in the Battery after occupying the city for seven years.  The departure of the British troops on that day became known as "Evacuation Day."   

For well over a century, no holiday was memorialized annually in  our city with greater gusto than "Evacuation Day -  not only by the Sons of the Revolution and other descendants of the Continental Army, but also by Irish immigrants who weren’t averse to reviving anti-British sentiment.

The holiday lost much of its popular appeal around World War I. By then, most New Yorkers figured it was time to let bygones be bygones and that it might seem like bad form to sneer at our British allies.