The Big Apple

According to Gerald Leonard Cohen's Origin of New York City's Nickname ‘The Big Apple' (New York: Peter Lang, 1991), while "apple" in American slang means "fellow" and "big apple" means "big shot," the first consistent use of the term to apply to New York City came in the 1920s.

John J. Fitz Gerald, a horseracing reporter for the Morning Telegraph, used the term (in columns from 1921-1927) for "New York City racetracks," and that sense of it – the metropolitan thoroughbred racing circuit – entered general usage after 1928.

Walter Winchell used it in a 1927 column to refer to Broadway ("Broadway is the Big Apple, the Main Stem, the goal of all ambition, the pot of gold at the end of a drab and somewhat colorless rainbow.").

In the 1930s, black jazz musicians applied the terms "the apple" or, less often, "the big apple", to Harlem or to the entire city, with overtones, again, of the ‘big time'.

In 1937 a dance called "the big apple" was launched in an African-American nightclub called "Fat Sam's Big Apple," in Columbia, South Carolina, and became a short lived national craze.

In 1971, Charles Gillett, then president of the New York Convention & Visitors Bureau, used the term as a name for New York City, in a marketing campaign, after which it won wide acceptance as a synonym for Gotham.

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