5 Things You Didn't Know: New York City
The most populous city in the United States is home to some of the nation’s most unusual history. In 1626, Manhattan was purchased for 60 guilders (about $1,000 today). Originally known as New Amsterdam, the English renamed it when they stole it back from the Dutch. George Washington was inaugurated here because Washington, DC had yet to be created. Before the shows on Broadway, New York City was the theater for a series of decisive battles during the American Revolutionary War. Along the way, the city has been littered with pirates, gangs, prostitutes, and punk rockers — and those are just the facts you learned in history class. Below are the things you’ve never heard about New York City.
1- The "Big Apple" was coined in horse racingIn the early '30s, touring jazz musicians started calling New York City the "Big Apple." A popular song and dance arose by the same name. People thought the slang came from vaudeville. Vaudevillian Billy Tucker called New York the "Big Apple" in the Chicago Defender newspaper as early as 1922. New York City was the premier place to perform, so it fit the old show-business saying: “There are many apples on the tree, but only one Big Apple.” However, more recently it’s been discovered that the horse racing writer John J. Fitz Gerald first used it in a 1921 article for the New York Morning Telegraph. He heard the term around the stables of New Orleans from guys who aspired to race on the big New York City tracks.
2- New York City has the lowest big-city crime rateIn the 19th century, lower Manhattan alone housed over 200 brothels and an estimated 75% of New York men had some form of STD. Allegedly, the word "hooker" came from the streetwalkers in Corlaer's Hook, a notorious Big Apple prostitution spot. Fast-forward through that era, past organized crime, the 1980s crack epidemic, the Latin Kings, Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, and into Mayor Bloomberg’s reign and now New York has been reporting the lowest crime rate among major American cities since 2005. A major step taken to reduce the crime rate was the effort to clean up Times Square and its longstanding sex industry.
There are a few more things we bet you didn't know about the Big Apple coming up...