Why Is New York Called The Big Apple?

Question

I Tried Looking at Some Sites But None Of Them Really Told The Answer.

Answer 1

"Rumor has it that the "Big Apple" is so named because during the depression, many former financiers would travel from their suburban cottages in full suits in order to sell apples on the streets of New York. The rumor goes that several well-to-do families had to make ends-meet by selling apples and the charade became know to many as the "Big Apple" scam of New York. Since apples have always been a big part of the New York economy the name simply stuck and was eventually promoted by local government. "

Answer 2

because of it size?

Answer 3

"There are actually several answers (nothing about New York

City is simple, after all). All are explained below, with the last

word going, appropriately enough, to SNYCH’s own Joe Zito,

one of this burg’s finest purveyors of high-quality urban history.

A veteran both of New York City’s inimitable press corps and its

police department, Joe—happily for us—is able to provide

authoritative first-hand testimony on this topic. Read on!

Various accounts have traced the “Big Apple” expression to

Depression-Era sidewalk apple vendors, a Harlem night

club, and a popular 1930s dance known as the “Big Apple.”

One fanciful version even links the name with a notorious

19th-century procuress!

In fact, it was the jazz musicians of the 1930s and ‘40s who put

the phrase into more or less general circulation. If a jazzman

circa 1940 told you he had a gig in the “Big Apple,” you knew

he had an engagement to play in the most coveted venue of all,

Manhattan, where the audience was the biggest, hippest, and

most appreciative in the country.

The older generation of jazzmen specifically credit Fletcher

Henderson, one of the greatest of the early Big Band leaders

and arrangers, with popularizing it, but such things are probably

impossible to document. Be that as it may, the ultimate source

actually was not the jazz world, but the racetrack.

As Damon Runyon (among many others) cheerfully pointed out,

New York in those days offered a betting man a lot of places to

go broke. There were no fewer than four major tracks nearby,

and it required no fewer than three racing journals to cover

such a lively scene—The Daily Racing Form (which still

survives on newsstands today) and The Running Horse and

The New York Morning Telegraph (which do not)—and the

ultimate credit for marrying New York to its durable catchphrase

goes to columnist John J. FitzGerald, who wrote for the

Telegraph for over 20 years.

Joe Zito, who joined the paper as a young man some 70-plus

years ago, recently reminisced about Jack FitzGerald and his

times.

In FitzGerald’s honor (and due largely to the strenuous efforts

of attorney-etymologist Barry Popick, who, like the columnist,

had migrated to NYC from upstate New York) a street sign

reading “Big Apple Corner” was installed at Broadway and

West 54th Street in 1997, near the hotel where FitzGerald died

in poverty in 1963—although a location near the old Telegraph

office might arguably have been a happier spot for it.

Despite its turf-related origins, by the 1930s and ’40s, the

phrase had become firmly linked to the city’s jazz scene. “Big

Apple” was the name both of a popular night club at West 135th

Street and Seventh Avenue in Harlem and a jitterbug-style

group dance that originated in the South, became a huge

phenomenon at Harlem’s great Savoy Ballroom and rapidly

spread across the country. (Neat cultural footnote: the great

African-American cinema pioneer Oscar Micheaux liked to

use the Big Apple as a venue for occasional screenings of his

latest feature film or documentary.)

A film short called The Big Apple came out in 1938, with an all-

Black cast featuring Herbert “Whitey” White’s Lindy Hoppers,

Harlem’s top ballroom dancers in the Swing Era. In a book

published the same year, bandleader Cab Calloway used the

phrase "Big Apple" to mean "the big town, the main stem,

Harlem." Anyone who loved the city would have readily agreed

with Jack FitzGerald: “There's only one Big Apple. That's New

York."

The term had grown stale and was in fact generally forgotten by

the 1970s. Then Charles Gillett, head of the New York

Convention & Visitors Bureau, got the idea of reviving it.

The agency was desperately trying to attract tourists to the

town Mayor John Lindsay had dubbed “Fun City,” but which

had become better-known for its blackouts, strikes, street crime

and occasional riots. What could be a more wholesome symbol

of renewal than a plump red apple?

The city's industrial-strength “I ♥ NY” campaign was launched

toward the end of the Lindsay administration in 1971, complete

with a cheerful Big Apple logo in innumerable forms (lapel pins,

buttons, bumper stickers, refrigerator magnets, shopping bags,

ashtrays, ties, tie tacks, “Big Apple” T-shirts, etc.).

Apparently Gillett was on to something, because at this writing,

over 35 years later, the campaign he launched—it won him a

Tourism Achievement award in 1994, by the way—is still going

strong." -http://salwen.com/apple.html

Answer 4

everybody wants to see it and it's Big................