Although the history of "Big Apple" was once thought a mystery, a clearer picture of the term's history has emerged due to the work of historian
Barry Popik as well as Gerald Cohen of the
Missouri University of Science and Technology. A number of false theories had previously existed, including a claim that the term derived from a woman named Eve who ran a brothel in the city. The earliest known usage of "big apple" appears in the book
The Wayfarer in New York (1909), in which
Edward Sandford Martin writes: Kansas is apt to see in New York a greedy city ... It inclines to think that the big apple gets a disproportionate share of the national sap.
William Safire considered this the coinage, but because the phrase is not quoted in the text, it is likely that it was used as a metaphor, and not as a nickname for the city.
Horse racing origin "The Big Apple" was popularized as a name for New York City by
John J. Fitz Gerald in a number of horse-racing articles for the
New York Morning Telegraph in the 1920s. The earliest of these was a casual reference on 3 May 1921: Fitz Gerald referred to the "big apple" frequently thereafter. He explained his use in a column dated February 18, 1924, under the headline "Around the Big Apple": Fitz Gerald reportedly first heard "The Big Apple" used to describe New York's racetracks by two African American stable hands at the New Orleans Fair Grounds. The Hotel Ameritania also once had a plaque which was installed in 1996, according to Popik, but it was removed during renovations to the building and was lost. Evidence can also be found in the
Chicago Defender, an African-American newspaper that had a national circulation. Writing for the
Defender on September 16, 1922, "Ragtime" Billy Tucker used the name "big apple" to refer to New York in a non-horse-racing context: Tucker had also earlier used "big apple" as a reference to
Los Angeles. It is possible that he simply used "big apple" as a nickname for any large city: == Popularity ==