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2007-02-23 17:04:25 · 6 answers · asked by -♦One-♦-Love♦- 7 in Travel United States New York City

6 answers

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.

2007-02-23 17:17:29 · answer #1 · answered by Albertan 6 · 1 0

In 1920s the New York race tracks were the cream of the crop, so going to the New York races was a big treat, the prize, allegorically a Big Apple.I
In the early 1970s the name played an important role in reviving New York's tourist economy through a campaign led by the New York Convention and Visitors Bureau. Today the nickname "The Big Apple," is the international description of the city and is synonymous with the cultural and tourist attractions of New York City.

2007-02-24 01:17:24 · answer #2 · answered by Anonymous · 0 0

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.”

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.

A 1971 campaign to increase tourism to New York City adopted the Big Apple as an officially recognized reference to New York City. The campaign featured red apples in an effort to lure visitors to New York City. It was hoped that the red apples would serve as a bright and cheery image of New York City, in contrast to the common belief that New York City was dark and dangerous. Since then, New York City has officially been The Big Apple.

2007-02-24 10:38:14 · answer #3 · answered by bunny942001 3 · 0 0

I think the ledgend was after immagrants passed through Ellis Island that were met by a dizzy of cart vendors selling produce to fake deeds, and the friut vendors claimed the apples grown in New York were the largest and best in the world and 65 percent of these vendors has apples to sell.

2007-02-24 01:11:25 · answer #4 · answered by Matticus Kole 4 · 1 0

Because it is one of the most known and one of the biggest cities in the world

2007-02-24 01:13:04 · answer #5 · answered by ? 2 · 0 0

bac kalong time ago lots of people traveling through it...like immigrants would sell apples to make money

2007-02-24 01:12:19 · answer #6 · answered by explodeum 1 · 1 0

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