The article comes from the Society for New York City History, Education Committee http://salwen.com/snych.html. We have to take it that they got to the bottom of the barrel on this.
When and how did New York City come to be called “The Big Apple”?
This is by far the most frequently asked question submitted to our New York History Hotline.
In popular folklore, the name is usually traced to early jazz musicians or long-ago sports figures. Often, the explanation of the so-called “origin” of this phrase is accompanied with plausible-sounding historical or biographical details, giving it an unmistakable (but alas, totally spurious) “ring of truth.”
Because this question continues to excite curiosity, and because the real facts are quite well known to serious historians, we provide the following authoritative account, based on our unique archival sources. The story may disappoint some readers – truth, after all, is often less colorful than fiction. But facts are facts.
In the early years of the nineteenth century, refugees from war-torn Europe began arriving in New York in great numbers. Many were remnants of the crumbling French aristocracy, forced to seek refuge abroad from the dread “Monsieur Guillotine.” Arriving here without funds or friends, many of these were forced to survive, as one contemporary put it, “by their wits or worse.”
One of these, arriving in late 1803 or early 1804, was Mlle. Evelyn Claudine de Saint-Évremond. Daughter of a noted courtier, wit, and littérateur, and herself a favorite of Marie Antoinette, Evelyn was by all accounts remarkably attractive: beautiful, vivacious, and well-educated, and she was soon a society favorite. For reasons never disclosed, however, a planned marriage the following year to John Hamilton, son of the late Alexander Hamilton, was called off at the last minute. Soon after, with support from several highly placed admirers, she established a salon – in fact, it appears to have been an elegantly furnished bordello – in a substantial house that still stands at 142 Bond Street, then one of the city’s most exclusive residential districts.
Evelyn’s establishment quickly won, and for several decades maintained, a formidable reputation as the most entertaining and discreet of the city’s many “temples of love,” a place not only for lovemaking, but also for elegant dinners, high-stakes gambling, and witty conversation. The girls, many of them fresh arrivals from Paris or London, were noted for their beauty and bearing. More than a few of them, apparently, were actually able to secure wealthy husbands from among the establishment’s clientele.
When New Yorkers insisted on anglicizing her name to “Eve,” Evelyn apparently found the biblical reference highly amusing, and for her part would refer to the temptresses in her employ as “my irresistable apples.” The young men-about-town soon got into the habit of referring to their amorous adventures as “having a taste of Eve’s Apples.” This knowing phrase established the speaker as one of the “in” crowd, and at the same time made it clear he had no need to visit one of the coarser establishments that crowded nearby Mercer Street, for instance. The enigmatic reference in Philip Hone’s famous diary to “Ida, sweet as apple cider” (October 4, 1838) has been described as an oblique reference to a visit to what had by then become a notorious but cherished civic institution.
The rest, as they say, is etymological history.
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