Why is New York known as the Big Apple? | Notes and Queries | guardian.co.uk

Why is New York known as the Big Apple?

• THE Big Apple was a bar on 42nd Street in New York which was much used by jazz musicians in the Twenties. When musicians bumped into each other while touring in the States they would always arrange to meet up again in the Big Apple, and in time this became synonymous with New York City.

  Sharon Simpson, London W14.

• THE CITY of New York for many years has had a large Spanish-speaking population. It is said that one member of this population saw the city (Manhattan in particular) as one large city block – “una manzana grande” – In Spanish manzana also means “apple”.

  Rick Holland, Cheadle Hulme, Cheshire.

• THE EXPLANATION that I once heard is that, in the 1920s and 1930s jazz musicians in America referred to engagements in large towns and cites as “a bite of the apple.” The largest city and most prestigious venue was New York – hence the Big Apple.

  Arthur Hasler, London N22.

• TO THE EARLY Protestant settlers in rural America, urban New York, with its confidence men and painted ladies, was seen as a den of sin and temptation which threatened their new Garden of Eden. Hence “The Big Apple”.

  Simon Bendle, Upminster, Essex.

• THE Big Apple was one of the many dances which proliferated during the 1920s and 1930s. It first appeared in New York about 1935.

  Munroe Hall, Bury, Lancs.

• AS A BORN and bred New Yorker, I never heard New York city referred to as the Big Apple before the mid-Seventies. At that time, New York City was bankrupt. Businesses were moving out and tourism was plummeting. It was in the course of the expensive publicity campaign designed to improve the city’s image that the phrase first came into common use. Why the “Big Apple”? Well, New York (the state) was at the time the country’s biggest producer of the fruit. Patrons of supermarkets all over America were familiar with “New York Apples”. Thus the slogan “New York City – the Big Apple” was developed to sell the city to middle America. New Yorkers, of course, never use the phrase.

  Maureen Basedow, W Germany.

• “Big Apple” was popularized by New York Morning Telegraph track writer John J. Fitz Gerald in the 1920s. Two of his columns were titled “On the Big Apple” and “Around the Big Apple.” He twice explained that he heard black stablehands in New Orleans use the term in response to where a winning horse would be shipped. “The Big Apple” meant the big reward, the big time, the place for big money.

  Barry Popik, New York

• I am sorry to admit this but Jeremy Beadle (sic) said on his LBC radio show back in the late 70’s that the Big Apple was so-called due to Central Park being a larger-scale verion of Liverpool’s Birkenhead Park. Birkenhead Park has a distinctive island in the middle of it that is in the shape of an apple core. Therefore, the corresponding island in Central Park is known as the “Big Apple”. Hence the name etc.

  Anyone doubting this story would be doubting the unimpeachable integrity of Mr Beadle. So think on.

  Austin Fisher, Auckland New Zealand

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