Charlie, when a minhag is a minhag shtus or keneged halacha, we drop it. “The Jews of new york” hundreds of years ago are not the forebears of the massively diverse jews who live in NY of today. Any jewish community after that time in NY, say under rabbi yaakov yosef, did not do such outlandish things such as change our davening to fit a non jewish holiday. Can you provide one even remotely relevant source in the poskim to permit such a thing? Rabbis in early America weren’t always poskim; are there teshuvos on the matter? What some shul did in the 1700s has no bearing on “minhag makom”, im sorry but that’s not how halacha works. If that were the case, you’d have to research what this community did in all of their minhagim; we’d all have to keep whatever zman they held for shabbos, their nusach, and everything else, but no one has ever paid attention to what Jews living in America did as basis for anything. I would give examples of things that early American rabbis permitted, but my rebbe rav belsky said he didn’t want to “start up with them” when i asked him about something particularly questionable that they allowed, so i will not do so either
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