New York answers to several nicknames, but none has traveled as far as “The Big Apple.” The phrase appears on souvenirs, in song titles, and across tourism campaigns, yet its origin has little to do with fruit and everything to do with the early twentieth-century horse-racing circuit. The story runs from a New Orleans stable yard to a Midtown street corner, with a long detour through jazz clubs and a city marketing office.
A Phrase Overheard At The Stables
The trail leads to John J. Fitz Gerald, a turf writer for the New York Morning Telegraph in the 1920s. As Fox 5 New York recounts, Fitz Gerald picked up the expression while reporting in New Orleans, where Black stablehands used “the big apple” to describe the New York racetracks they aspired to reach. To horsemen, the city represented the richest purses and the highest level of competition, the destination every jockey and trainer hoped to make.
Etymologists have since pinned down the timeline. Fitz Gerald’s earliest known reference appeared on May 3, 1921, and historian Barry Popik traced the New Orleans conversation to January 1920. Fitz Gerald did not coin the term so much as carry it north and put it in print, where it began to spread among racing fans.
“Around The Big Apple”
By the mid-1920s, the phrase had become his signature. Fitz Gerald titled his column “Around the Big Apple,” and in a February 1924 entry he spelled out exactly what he meant. He wrote that the Big Apple was the dream of every rider who ever sat a thoroughbred, adding, “There’s only one Big Apple. That’s New York.” By 1926 he was describing the expression as his own.
The framing mattered. Because the term already signaled ambition and reward within racing, readers grasped the metaphor without explanation. The apple stood for the ultimate prize, and New York was where that prize lived.
From The Paddock To The Bandstand
The nickname did not stay confined to the sports pages. In the 1930s, Black jazz musicians adopted “The Big Apple,” often shortened to “the Apple,” to refer to New York in general and Harlem in particular as the center of the music world. For performers, playing the Apple carried the same meaning it held for jockeys: arrival at the top of the field.
That migration has fueled a competing account of the nickname’s lineage. Writer Regi Taylor has argued that the official narrative understates Harlem’s role in both creating and spreading the term, noting that one of its earliest printed definitions appeared in bandleader Cab Calloway’s glossary of jazz slang. The debate centers less on whether Fitz Gerald popularized the phrase than on who deserves credit for the culture that kept it alive.
A Marketing Revival In The 1970s
After the 1930s, the nickname faded from common use. Its return came through a deliberate campaign. In the 1970s, the term was revived for a tourism push led by Charles Gillet, then president of the New York Convention and Visitors Bureau. The effort leaned on a simple visual: the city skyline rendered as an apple, printed on stickers, buttons, and advertising across subways, buses, and newspapers.
The campaign arrived as New York’s image was struggling, and it aimed to recast the city as energetic rather than chaotic. Contemporary coverage documented the scale of the giveaway, with civic boosters distributing thousands of Big Apple stickers in the early years of the push. The branding stuck, and the nickname re-entered everyday speech, this time anchored to the city as a whole rather than its racetracks.
A Corner Named In Recognition
Formal acknowledgment of the man behind the phrase came decades later. In 1997, Mayor Rudy Giuliani signed legislation designating the southwest corner of West 54th Street and Broadway as “Big Apple Corner,” the spot where Fitz Gerald lived from 1934 to 1963. The residence, then the Hotel Bryant and now the Hotel Ameritania, sat at the intersection for the writer’s final decades.
The recognition has not been without gaps. According to Popik, a commemorative plaque installed nearby in 1996 was removed during renovations and never recovered, leaving the street sign as the main physical marker. Much of the documented history itself rests on the research of Popik and Gerald Cohen, who spent years tracing the term through racing records and period newspapers to separate fact from folklore.
What remains is a nickname with an unusually traceable path. It began as racetrack slang, gained cultural weight in Harlem’s music scene, lapsed into obscurity, and returned through a coordinated marketing effort. The orchard imagery that decorates so much New York merchandise is, in that sense, a later invention layered onto a phrase whose roots lie in barns, betting windows, and a sportswriter’s column.
