The Home Run Apple at the NY Mets’ Citi Field, Queens, New York
8 March 2023
New York City is known as the Big Apple. The nickname dates to the early twentieth century and arises out of a confluence of several discourses: Black slang, horse racing, the theater, and an older use of the phrase to refer to the stakes of a wager.
The use of big apple to refer to betting stakes is American, and perhaps specifically New England, slang dating to at least 1839. The following appears in Boston’s Saturday Morning Transcript of 16 March of that year:
The New York Courier says that Mr. CALHOUN will be the Special Ambassador to England, to settle the Boundary question. We will wager a big apple that Mr. Calhoun will not, and that Mr. WEBSTER will be the man. The President, and at least two members of the Cabinet, are strongly inclined to give the appointment to the Massachusetts Senator.
Other examples can be easily found. For instance, there is this from Boston’s Bay State Democrat of 30 December 1840:
Reader, we will bet you a big apple that you can’t read our correspondent’s letter from Salt River, without having your risible faculties affected “prodigiously!”
Or this from Massachusetts’s Salem Register of 23 December 1841
A little fellow came running into our office, a few mornings since, in hot haste for a newspaper. The paper hadn’t been left, and the reason he called for it was, “because Father couldn’t go to his work, and Mother couldn’t eat her breakfast till the paper came.” That boy will be a grand subscriber for somebody, we’ll wager a big apple. It is needless to add that his father always pays for this paper punctually.
And a big apple became associated with gambling on horseracing by 18 June 1842 when this appeared in New York’s The New World:
If it be discreditable to like a horse-race, there is one stain at least on my escutcheon[.] From the time I first learned to appreciate ambition and speed—two attributes, so common to our people—I have always yearned toward horses fleet of foot, and if I ever travel to bankruptcy (which Heaven avert) it will be on a fast horse. Yet gambling is detestable to me in every form—I never stake even “a big apple” on a contingency, and would prefer pauperism to wealth gained by luck.
The association of big apple with New York City can be traced to the following extended metaphor that appears in 1909’s The Wayfarer in New York. Here a big apple is something important, something that garners the most attention:
New York is merely one of the fruits of that great tree whose roots go down in the Mississippi Valley, and whose branches spread from one ocean to the other, but the tree has no great degree of affection for its fruit. It inclines to think that the big apple gets a disproportionate share of the national sap. It is disturbed by the enormous drawing power of a metropolis which constantly attracts to itself wealth and its possessors from all the lesser centers of the land. Every city, every State pays an annual tribute of men and of business to New York, and no State or city likes particularly to do it.
This sense gains a purchase in theater slang, and we see the following in the Chicago Defender of 28 October 1911. This appearance is doubly significant in that the Chicago Defender was a major Black newspaper, and the appearance marks its use in Black slang as well:
George Hayes and the Clancy Twins are the “big apple on the tree” this week. The twins can sing and their slang is the cutest stunt imaginable.
We next see big apple appear in several Defender columns by Billy Tucker in 1920. Tucker was a performer who wrote a column for the paper from Los Angeles titled Coast Dope. His column for 15 May 1920 makes a reference to L.A. as the Big Apple, using the term in reference to a big city but showing that it was not yet specifically associated with New York:
Dear Pal, Tony: No, Ragtime Billy Tucker hasn’t dropped completely out of existence, but is still in the “Big Apple.” Los Angeles. I want to tell the world and a half of Kankakee that a few weeks ago, when I told the Old Roll Top Desk Man that I could place entertainers and musicians in sunny California, I received a “zillion” letters from all over the United States, including Georgia.
Later that year, 16 September 1920, Tucker makes his first recorded reference to New York as the Big Apple:
Dear Pal, Tony: When your letter came last week I had already sent the “Coast Dope” in. I am awfully sorry that it didn’t come a day sooner. I trust your trip to “the big apple” (New York) was a huge success and only wish I had been able to make it with you, but they keep me too busy out here.
But what cemented the relationship between New York and the Big Apple is the writing of John J. Fitz Gerald, who wrote a racing column for that city’s Morning Telegraph. Fitz Gerald was especially fond of the term. He first uses it in his column for 3 May 1921:
J.P. Smith, with Tippity Witchet and others of the L.T. Bauer string, is scheduled to start for “the big apple” to-morrow after a most prosperous Spring campaign at Bowie and Havre de Grace.
And there is this from 1 April 1922:
B. Parke, the stable rider, is reputed a good 2-year-old rider, and the stable connections claim he is a gun away from the barrier. He will have the acid test put to him on “The Big Apple” within a few weeks.
On 18 February 1924, Fitz Gerald wrote on how the term came to his attention. It was used in a conversation he overheard between two New Orleans stable hands that probably occurred on 15 January 1920. Fitz Gerald’s reconstruction of the conversation is as follows:
The Big Apple. The dream of every lad that ever threw a leg over a thoroughbred and the goal of all horsemen. There’s only one Big Apple. That’s New York.
———
Two dusky stable hands were leading a pair of thoroughbreds around the “cooling rings” of adjoining stables at the Fair Grounds in New Orleans and engaging in desultory conversation.
“Where y’all goin’ from here?” queried one.
“From here we’re headin’ for The Big Apple,” proudly replied the other.
“Well, you’d better fatten up them skinners or all you’ll get from the apple will be the core,” was the quick rejoinder.
And we see the following in the Tampa Sunday Tribune of 4 January 1925. This citation shows that the term had not only reached Florida by this date, but it had returned to theater circles—if it had ever left:
Angels are popularly supposed to have wings. Those of Broadway usually use theirs to fly away from the “Big Apple”—as it is sometimes called—but only after their wings have been prettily singed by some fascinating cutie whom they backed financially to the tune of many thousands.
After a while, the use of Big Apple declined until it was revived as a tourism slogan in the 1970s.
The Big Apple is a great example of how a phrase can circulate in multiple discourses, acquiring different meanings and connotations, before going “mainstream” and narrowing to a single, primary sense.
Sources:
Credit for this one goes, first and foremost, to Barry Popik, who has relentlessly researched this phrase over the years.
Adams, Minnie. “Musical And Dramatic.” Chicago Defender, 28 October 1911, 6. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.
Bay State Democrat (Boston, Massachusetts), 30 December 1840, 2. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.
Fitz Gerald, John J. “Nevada Farm Has Fine Juveniles.” Morning Telegraph (New York), 1 April 1922, 8. Fultonhistory.com. (The Morning Telegraph is not, to my knowledge, digitized. The Fulton History site, however, has some select pages available, and transcripts of the many, if not most, of the early Big Apple uses in that paper can be seen at Barry Popik’s site.)
Green’s Dictionary of Slang, 2023, s.v. Big Apple, n.
“Newspaper Readers of the Right Stamp.” Salem Register (Massachusetts), 23 December 1841, 2. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.
Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, December 2008, s.v. Big Apple, n.
Page, Will A. “Behind the Curtain of Broadway’s Billion-Dollar Beauty Trust.” Tampa Sunday Tribune (Florida), 4 January 1925, Magazine Section 6. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.
Popik, Barry. “Why is New York City Called the Big Apple?” Barrypopik.com, 5 July 2004.
Ramble, Lincoln. “The Course and the Race.” The New World (New York), 18 June 1842, 395. HathiTrust Digital Archive.
“Saturday Evening.” Saturday Morning Transcript (Boston, Massachusetts), 16 March 1839, 1. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.
Tucker, Billy. “Coast Dope.” Chicago Defender, 15 May 1920, 7. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.
———. “Coast Dope.” Chicago Defender, 16 September 1920, 8. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.
The Wayfarer in New York. New York: Macmillan, 1909, xv. HathiTrust Digital Archive.
Photo credit: Richiekim, 2012. Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.