NYC baseball cap: Big Apple

Every city has a nickname. Only one city has a nickname that became a religion.

The Big Apple. Two words that carry the weight of eight million people, five boroughs, four hundred years of history, and the single most audacious urban experiment the human race has ever attempted. Two words that mean something different to every person who has ever said them — a dream to the ones who came here chasing something, a home to the ones who never left, a legend to the ones who visited once and spent the rest of their lives trying to get back.

But where did it come from?

The origin of the Big Apple nickname is one of the great New York City stories that most New Yorkers have never fully heard. The phrase first appeared in print in 1909 in a book called The Wayfarer in New York written by Edward Martin who used it as a metaphor — New York as the big apple at the center of the tree that the rest of the country reaches for. Jazz musicians picked it up in the 1920s and used it to describe New York City's jazz scene — to play New York was to play the Big Apple, the biggest and most prestigious stage in the world. Harlem jazz clubs in the 1930s ran a dance called The Big Apple that packed floors every night. A racing reporter named John Fitzgerald had been using the phrase since 1924 to describe the New York racing circuit — the big apple, the prize worth winning.

But it was not until 1971 that the nickname truly became the city's own. New York City's tourism bureau launched a marketing campaign built around the Big Apple name to combat the city's declining reputation during one of its darkest financial periods. The campaign worked. The city that was on the verge of bankruptcy in the 1970s came back — loud, proud, and wearing its nickname like the declaration it had always deserved to be.

The Big Apple endured because it is true. New York City is the prize. It is the standard. It is the place every musician, every artist, every writer, every dreamer, every person who has ever believed that they were built for something bigger than the town they grew up in has pointed themselves toward at some moment in their life. To make it in New York is to make it anywhere. To live in New York is to understand something about ambition and resilience and the sheer improbable beauty of what human beings can build when they decide to build it together.

The apple on the front of this hat is not a fruit. It is a philosophy.

This hat is for everyone who has ever taken a bite.

Made for the locals. Inspired by the legends.

• 100% cotton

• Unstructured, 6-panel, low-profile

• Soft crown

• Pre-curved visor

• Matching fabric adjustable strap

• Metal snap buckle with an antique brass finish

• Head circumference: 21.65″–25.19″ (55 cm–64 cm)

• Blank product sourced from China and Myanmar