New York

New York is massive, it's so bewilderingly big it takes over an hour to get from outer Queens to Manhattan.
Brooklyn alone has 2.5 million people and the most populous borough of New York. Most of the population explosions in New York happened between 1771 and 1910, with 126% growth in 1790, by 1860 the city had over a million people with the total figure in 2011 being around 8.2 million.
Why New York is called 'The Big Apple' seems lost in history somewhat, apparently the earliest citation is in a book in 1909 where the author Martin Wayfarer writes "Kansas is apt to see in New York a greedy city. . . . It inclines to think that the big apple gets a disproportionate share of the national sap".
 There are a number of variations on this quote including:

• "'the big apple,' gets a disproportionate share of the sap from the country's tree of wealth which is rooted in the Mississippi Valley."
• "New York [was] 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 big apple [New York] gets a disproportionate share of the national sap."

The term was later popularized by a sporting journalist when writing about horse racing in New York in the 20's, he kept repeating it and so it stuck. 

New York is very different from York, York has cobbled stones, castles walls and bits of grass about the place, New York put all the grass in one location and has lots of things stacked up high.

It was first called New Amsterdam, probably because it's so flat then the English came and decided that was silly name and called it New York after King Charles II gave it to his brother, the Duke of York, he did this because there were no hills big enough to put castles on top of.

There you go, everything you need to know about New York.