Big Apple

Personally, I have no idea why there is such fascination with New York City. It’s big, it’d crowded and it’s expensive – yet somehow it is a city that is known to everyone all over the world and it is one of a few that has its own recognizable nickname “the Big Apple”.

I did have a chance to go there for a week last year and even my mother joined me from sunny California for a nice mother-daughter weekend. We did the touristy stuff and then we got stuck – I mean literally stuck at the airport as it just happened that New York was hit by the biggest blizzard of the century. So yes, there was snow and there were a lot of cancelled flights at the airport.

Yet, despite my hours of boredom at the JFK airport I did manage to think that there is something to the one and only BIG APPLE- yes that is what New York is nicknamed for. Why do we call New York City the Big Apple? While I’ve seen several apple trees in New York City, I don’t particularly recall them as being a notable quantity – there are certainly more pigeons than apples in New York City, but we don’t call New York City the “Big Pigeon.”

Surprisingly, the name is connected to horse races. Who would have thought! At the beginning of the 20^th century, a writer for the New York Morning Telegraph, John Fitzgerald, referred to New York City’s races “around the Big Apple.” It is rumored that he got the term from jockeys and trainers in New Orleans who aspired to race on New York City tracks, referring to them as the Big Apple. Later on, the City’s jazz musicians began to refer to the city as the Big Apple and then in 1971 a campaign to increase tourism to New York adopted the term “Big Apple” as an officially recognizable reference to the biggest city in the USA.