NYT on Daniel Cassidy--("Big Onion" = NYC); first follow-up

[Gerald Cohen]

     After my posting on "Big Onion" yesterday (Saturday) I belatedly
checked an obvious source, namely Barry Popik's excellent website
(barrypopik.com); see below for his entry on "Big Onion,² which clarifies
that "Big Onion" (NYC) was almost non-existent  prior to the 1991 "Big
Onion" Walking Tours and even afterwards never caught on.
There is no justification for including ³Big Onion² in a list of slang terms
that derive from Irish, and everything about this entry in Cassidy¹s book
points to scholarly sloppiness.
 
Gerald Cohen
 
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[from barrypopik.com]
Entry from July 13, 2004
Big Onion (recent, post-Big Apple nickname)
In 1991, "Big Onion" Walking Tours started in New York City. I keep thinking
they have the wrong city. Chicago is often called the "big onion" because
some people think that's what the name "Chicago" means.

According to the "Big Onion" people, long before it was called "the Big
Apple," people who knew New York called it "the Big Onion." I asked them
simple questions. Who said this? When did they say it? Do you have any
historical citations for "Big Onion"? I wasn't given anything.

The New York Times is completely digitized. A search for "big onion" in the
Times and in the digitized Brooklyn Eagle turns up not a single citation.

Only one relevant hit shows up on the millions of digitized pages of
Newspaperarchive.com. As you might have guessed, the use is post-Big Apple:

27 December 1986, Frderick (MD) Post, pg. A-8, col. 4:
These and other tidbits are revealed in Sharon Churcher's new book, "New
York Confidential," which refers to the Big Apple as the Big Onion.

The walking tour company is about the only place you'll see "Big Onion."
It's a good walking tour company--with a bad name.

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