ABSTRACT
The name, the Big Apple, was originally popularized by jazz musicians of the 1920s and 1930s who considered New York City the best place to create, to succeed, and, said the poet Langston Hughes, to have fun. New York was the dream city of excitement and opportunity. However, the Big Apple label had contradictory connotations. Although the city was glamorous and inspiring, it was often considered too shiny on the outside and too rotten on the inside. Significantly, the name was abandoned after the 1940s and was not revived again until the 1970s. Thus, it captured a unique moment in time, an optimistic but anxious period when New York represented different, sometimes disparate, dreams for the future. 2
In Gotham, the period between the end of World War I and the end of World War II was shaped by both dream and nightmare. The threadbare thirties negated the Roaring Twenties. The desperation of the Harlem riots shattered the optimism of the Harlem Renaissance. The superficiality of Jimmy Walker parodied the social conscience of Al Smith. The protests of Adam Clayton Powell Jr. strained the reform efforts of Fiorello H. LaGuardia. If foreigners were awed by the "gigantic chaos" of New York City, Americans were dismayed by the riots of 1935 and 1943. Gotham's glitter was irrevocably
tarnished by anger so profound that it exploded twice in seven years. Indeed, conflict was such a powerful undercurrent of city life that, to one French visitor, New York was not a whirlpool but "a perpetual thunderstorm."3
