There's a couple of different stories behind the nickname the “Big Apple”. In one story, the phrase came from the jazz musicians in the 1930s and '40s – more specifically, Fletcher Henderson. Fletcher Henderson was one of the greatest Big Band leaders and arrangers of that time. If you were to tell a jazzman anytime in those two decades that you had a gig in the “Big Apple”, they knew you meant New York City. In that time, Manhattan was the place to play jazz. Its audience was known as the biggest and hippest in the whole country, not to mention appreciative. But, ultimately, the jazz world was not the source of the phrase coming to be so well known. Instead, it was the racetrack. That is one story that everyone seems to agree on. According to that story, the nickname became well known by a columnist. John J FitzGerald wrote for The New York Morning Telegraph. He was a columnist for over 20 years. Within those 20 years, he got credit for making that phrase more common. John, or Jack as his co-workers and friends called him, used the phrase “The Big Apple” in print (eventually his column was called “Around the Big Apple”). According to him, he overheard that phrase being used in New Orleans by two stable boys. By the 1970s, though, the term had been forgotten. Then enters a man by the name of Charles Gillett. Charles was head of the New York Convention & Visitors Bureau at the time. He was in charge of trying to come up with tourist attractions to boost the city's moral and bring in more business. At that time, the city had gone down hill in the sense that there were blackouts, strikes, and riots. Charles' desperate attempt to help the city and bring tourists was to revive the nickname the Big Apple. Around 1971, with Charles' help, the city started an “I ♥ NY” campaign. The city came up with putting that phrase of loving New York on everything they could think of ranging from pins to buttons to ties to t-shirts. Anyone can guess how well this turned out, too, because 44 years later, tourists can still get the same souvenirs with the same logo from the '70s.