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Interestingly, this nickname – Big Apple, in English – came from a criticism about the volume of public resources allocated to the city. The term first appeared in 1909, in the book The Wayfarer in New York (“The Traveler in New York”), by Edward S. Martin. The author used a metaphor to criticize the distribution of income among American states. In the book, the United States is described as a great tree and the states as its fruits. So, Martin wondered, if New York was just another fruit on that tree, why should the “Big Apple” receive a disproportionate share of the country’s wealth? The nickname, however, took a while to catch on.
In the 1920s, sports journalist John Gerald of the New York Morning Telegraph named his column Around the Big Apple. In the 1930s and 1940s, several jazz musicians adopted the expression and gave yet another important boost to the idea. The nickname, however, fell into disuse in the following decades. It was only in the 1970s, thanks to a local government campaign to encourage tourism, that the Big Apple became an internationally known name.