by Andrew Guilio

Created on: March 14, 2011

New York City is called The Big Apple, but there is not a definite originator of the term or a definite date it started.

That does not really matter.

For all practical purposes, it took off in the 1970s. The man responsible was Charles Gillet who was president of the New York Convention and Visitors Bureau.  Gillet used the term as part of an ad campaign for New York.

The term had been around when Gillet started the campaign.

According to New York legend, the term, The Big Apple, was used as far back as the 1900s, but nobody can definitely say why and who started it.

Probably the biggest investigator of the term is a lawyer named Barry Popik who has become an expert on this term and other terms commonly used in the everyday US language.  In his writings, he feels the that term came from racetrack slang and was popularized by a racing columnist from the old Morning Telegraph named John Fitzgerald.

According to the Society for New York City History  (SNYCH), stable hands used the term, The Big Apple, to describe the racetracks in New York.  That was where the big money races were run.

Jazz musicians also used the term to cover the bigger money payments they received when they played in New York as compared to what was paid in other parts of the country.

The Big Apple was also the name of a short musical movie in 1937 that featured The Arthur Murray Shag Dancers.

The Big Apple was also a song in the 1930s.

In the early 1970s, New York’s reputation was not good and it needed a boost to downplay its bad image.  Charles Gillet, who had been president of the New York Convention and Visitors Bureau since 1964 began to popularize the term.

According to his obituary in the New York Times on December 6, 1995, Gillet was a jazz fan and used the term in the New York advertising campaign.

Gillet handed out red Big Apple stickers.  New York personalities started to pass out red pins.

The campaign caught.  To this day, New York is still described as The Big Apple.

Charles Gillet continued as president of New York City Convention and Visitor’s Bureau until 1988.  He had worked for the bureau for forty years.

In 1994, Gillet was awarded the Tourism Achievement award for The Big Apple advertising campaign.

Sources

www.barrypopik.com.

www.salen.com/

www.ny.com/histfacts

www.imdb.com/title

Wikipedia

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