The City Council voted yesterday to rename the intersection of West 54th Street and Broadway "Big Apple Corner" in honor of local resident John FitzGerald, a boozy racing writer who stole the term from stablehands in New Crleans and brought it to New York.

"The Big Apple," FitzGerald wrote in his debut column for the New York Morning Telegraph on Feb.18, 1924. "The dream of every lad that ever threw a leg over a thoroughbred. There's only one Big Apple. That's New York."

The vote should end more than a decade of controversy. In the mid-1980s, conventional wisdom held that the "Big Apple" was a jazz term.

Then Mayor Ed Koch got into an interstate spitting match with Columbia, S.C., Mayor Patten Adams, who had the audacity to claim that "The Big Apple" was a dance craze that originated at Fat Sam's, a Columbia nightclub.

They were both proven wrong by history buff Barry Popik, who spent years scouring documents and newspapers until discovering FitzGerald's columns a few years ago.

That was the easy part. Getting anyone to believe him has been harder than getting a seat on the Lexington Avenue express at rush hour.

"Everyone is tied to the idea that it was a jazz term," said Popik, who, among other triumphs, solved the mystery of the term "hot dog" (Yale University dining hall, 1894). "There was no talking them out of it." So Popik began a four-year, one-man, thousands-of-Xeroxes crusade to inform people about John FitzGerald. He met rejection at every step until the Historic Landmarks Preservation Center accepted his research and put up a plaque honoring FitzGerald last year.

The local community board followed suit, which led to the council vote. Of course, not everyone, least of all, the folks in South Carolina, is convinced.

"An obscure newspaper column had nothing to do with it," former Mayor Adams told the Post. "I'm sticking with the original story: New York stole The Big Apple dance from Fat Sam's."

Reactions like Adams' make Popik realize that yesterday's council vote is the beginning of years' more work. "With the street sign, now I can go to the all the tour guides like Feder's and tell them they're wrong," Popik sighed.