How NYC Went From Fun City to The Big Apple
I spent a lot of time in the 1970s this week, amid lots of talk in New York City now about whether the “Bad Old Days” are returning, while also diving into some relatively recent history on The Daily Beast’s The New Abnormal podcast, where I was excited to ask Michael Wolff (at the 35:00 mark) about the time he partnered with Jeffrey Esptein and Harvey Weinstein to try and buy New York Magazine, but he wasn’t very excited to be asked about that.
On PBS’s MetroFocus, I talked about why New York City is having such a time getting more people vaccinated, among other things.
On FAQ NYC, photographer David Godlis (the photos in this post are from his terrific new book, Godlis Streets) and writer Luc Sante shared some excellent stories about the New York City of the 1970s, and capturing it on film and in words.
And, staying in the 1970s, I wrote for the Daily News about how New York City became Fun City and then the Big Apple on the watch of John Lindsay, and some lessons in that history for Bill de Blasio and Eric Adams.
Welcome to Bill de Blasio’s party - New York Daily News
Some relevant New York City history as Bill de Blasio is suddenly hamming it up in his role as mayor, waving “homemade” FOMO signs while trying to use people’s Fear of Missing Out to lure people back to the city and those who holded up here to return to their offices and old ways.
After eight years of mostly gritting his teeth at having to perform his job, he’s singing for his supper now while looking toward his next gig after he’s term-limited out in January, and as he’s promoting a series of big-star “homecoming week” concerts that are supposed to show New York City is back from its plague year, baby.
Since de Blasio is on his way out, he has every incentive to tout a recovery and hope he’s proven right since it’ll be Eric Adams’ problem if he’s wrong. That’s a very different circumstance than the one faced by the last extremely tall and proudly progressive mayor who neglected that job to run an embarrassing presidential campaign.
That was John Lindsay, whose 1965 campaign slogan of “He’s Fresh and Everyone Else Is Tired” may be second in our history only to Norman Mailer and Jimmy Breslin’s “The Other Guys Are the Joke” and “No More Bulls–t” appeal to make a “New York for New Yorkers” in 1969, but Lindsay won in both those years and those jokers got crushed.
“This is a fun and exciting city even when it’s a struck city,” Lindsay said, doing his best to talk up a bad scene while walking to his new office after a transit strike beginning on his very first day in office crippled the city. “I still think it’s a fun city.”
Sportswriter Dick Schaap seized on that line for a gallows-humor column entitled “What’s New in Fun City?”
New York’s new name was on everyone’s lips, not to mention Times Square strip joints. There was even a “Fun City” musical in 1972, the year Lindsay ran for president, co-written and headlined by Joan Rivers in Broadway’s first-ever lead role featuring a lesbian protagonist, though the show closed after a week.
One reason Fun City resonated, as critic J. Hoberman has detailed, is that Lindsay helped get the movie business back here, with his administration cutting through red tape to open things up and Hizzoner in effect playing himself while visiting almost every production as New York became the backdrop for countless bleak classics.
“The star that attracts the filmmakers to New York City — dirty, crowded, hot, frenetic, soaring, squalid and graffiti-covered as it is — is New York City,” New York Times critic Vincent Canby declared at the time about what’s sometimes looked back on now as the “bad old days” that Adams has vowed to fend off as he’s been taking a post-primary victory lap while also promising to give us a fun mayor again after 20 grinding years of Mike Bloomberg and de Blasio.
The Fun City nickname gave way in the early 70s to the revival of an older one that, as etymologist Barry Popik has exhaustively cataloged, came from the race tracks and was first popularized in the 1920s by sportswriter John J. Fitz Gerald.
Seeing Fun City treated as a national punchline amid a fiscal crisis and rising crime 50 years later, Charles Gillett, who spent his life promoting the city for the New York Convention and Visitors Bureau, started handing out those little red pins playing off of the phrase he’d picked up from jazz musicians: “There are many apples on the tree, but when you pick New York City, you pick the Big Apple.” The word spread and the new nickname stuck.
But while Gillett found the phase through jazzmen who’d found it through the racetrack, it was first used in the introduction to a 1909 book, “The Wayfarer in New York,” about the relationship between the city and the nation:
“New York is merely one of the fruits of that great tree whose roots go down in the Mississippi Valley, and whose branches spread from one ocean to the other, but the tree has no great degree of affection for its fruit. It inclines to think that the big apple gets a disproportionate share of the national sap…Every city, every State pays an annual tribute of men and of business to New York, and no State or city likes particularly to do it.”
There may be some wisdom in that for Adams, who as a candidate infamously told newcomers to “Go back to Iowa! You go back to Ohio!”
Here’s hoping the city keeps collecting its annual tribute after Homecoming Week and our promised but far from certain post-pandemic revival.
One other line from that introduction that’s a word to the wise: “To ride a tall horse does not make a man great but… New York is a very tall horse (so) many who ride her look bigger and feel bigger for that exploit.”
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