STUMPED NEW YORK.(The Talk of the Town)(New-York Historical Society's two hundredth anniversary)

The New-York Historical Society celebrates its two hundredth anniversary this year, having survived, in recent decades, the threat of bankruptcy and the selling off of part of its collections. In spite of these reversals, demand has not slackened for at least one of the society's public services: that of providing answers to arcane questions about New York City to which even the powers of Google have failed to come up with an adequate response.

The questions fielded by the Historical Society's team of three librarians, and the answers gleaned from the society's collection of two million manuscripts, three hundred and fifty thousand books and pamphlets, and fifteen thousand maps and atlases, are the stuff of dinner-table pontification and barroom bets. In which apartment at 55 West Eighth Street did Jimi Hendrix live? (Unanswerable, unfortunately, without rental records.) How do you pronounce Coenties Slip? (The library doesn't have a definitive answer, though it does possess a card file with a reference to a letter from 1915 in which the writer asserts, "I have recently obtained confirmation of the pronunciation 'Quinches,' as being the correct New York-Dutch version.") Did Robert Moses interfere with the plans to build the Guggenheim Museum? (This one asked, presumably, by the one New Yorker who doesn't have a copy of Robert A. Caro's "The Power Broker" on his or her bookshelf.)

The most commonly asked question is about the origin of the term "the Big Apple." (It seems to have started with African-American stable-hands in New Orleans in the nineteen-twenties; an earlier usage of the term, in a 1909 collection of vignettes called "The Wayfarer in New York," is, according to the Historical Society's official line, a red herring.) The second most commonly asked question is why the name "New-York Historical Society" has a hyphen. That's the original spelling of New York, apparently, established long before anyone thought of applying fruit ...