You know, like “MUrray Hill 0-9554” or “PLaza 2-9338”. Recently I saw a couple of TV shows, intended to be contemporary, where this was done.
Do they do this anywhere else?
And while we’re on the subject, did any Dopers ever have
a phone number with less than 7 local digits?
Well, it’s just an arbitrary thing you can do if you want to. If your number is 555-1212, you can say it’s “KLondike” 5-1212.
Of course we do! It’s one of our hundreds of fascinating quirks!
If you’d like to discuss this further, call me at home at QUincey 3-5048.
no.
My mom remembers her sisters’ phone numbers by exchange and number, and they’re all in California.
IIRC, everybody used to do this back in “the old days”. We used to have “CLifford” as our exchange, but sometime in the 1960s they started using the more impersonal “25…” And I lived in New Jersey.
I suspect that when they first started adding numbers and eliminatinf operators they used the names (Murray Hill, Butterfield, Clifford, etc.) as a way to cushion the blow of having a machine doing the switching for you.
Remember how this started – at one time you only had to dial 4 or 5 numbers and have a human operator connect you. The phones numbers were part of an exchange, and these were referred to by those poetic names. I don’t know if they had numbers at first or not. Eventually the connections were made automatic even between exchanges (as they always knew it eventually would) and you didn’t need the operators anymore – except for long-distance calls. When they went to “all digit dialing” (no operator, you simply prefaced the three-digit area code) there were protests against it. Allan Sherman had a hilarious song about how everyone should call the phone company and complain. The problem was, you had to dial the number first…
International calls used to require a operator, too. Now I simply use the country code and I can dial direct. It gives me great security to know that my daughter, hitting numbers at random, can accidentally connect me to Tuva if she does it right.
Was the phenomenon restricted to New York? I didn’t think so, but since so many of those old TV shows took place in NY, who knows? 
When I was a kid I remember listening to an old Alan Sherman song “Let’s all call up AT&T” (or something to that effect) and my mother explaining to me that the phone company used to assign the words as prefixes to numbers, but wasn’t doing it any more. This would have been in the early 70’s, but a lot of people still used the old prefixes. Now that almost any 3 digit sequence is a valid exchange (including 0 and 1 as the second digit, formerly only used for area codes) this makes it impossible to assign word prefixes to everyone.
These days, the only time you hear words or names for phone numbers is when a company requests a specific phone number, although these are typically done with toll-free numbers, and I’m sure everyone’s familiar with them. Of course, if your phone number consists only of digits 2-9, you can have some fun figuring out what words you can spell with it.
I’m 42 and grew up in L.A., and the first phone number I remember was CRestview 5-0xx. It’s still my parents’ number but we just say 275-xxxx now. I think we stopped using the
exchange name around 1968.
Funny thing was, there was also a BRadshaw exchange in the same area, which translates to the same numbers. I suppose
they all had to be reassigned.
It is not just a New York phenomenon. In the olden days, the first two numbers that you dialed represented the city. These designations are still in effect with people who have had their phones for a long time - I would assume some of them are still used even today, though they are not tied in anymore, theyare just extensions in a particular geographical region now.
For example, my grandmother passed away a few years ago. She still had an old Bell dial telephone there with the number (212) JAmaica 3-4643 imprinted on the dial. Of course, the area code was long ago changed to 718 in Queens, but the number stayed 523-4643 until she died.
My guess is in areas which have had phone ervice for 40+ years, the extension numbers still match up with a place in that geographical area.
Yer pal,
Satan
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The exchanges for Scarsdale are still SC1, SC2 and SC3, but everyone these days just says “723.”
Boring if you ask me. I love hunting around the keypad for the letters.
Ah, they still do that in parts of Philadelphia—my mother’s number is LAfayette 5-XXXX (like I’m really going to post my mother’s phone number!). I grew up at MOhawk 4-6742, and I still have friends back home with ROsemont and RIttenhouse exchanges.
One of the gracious things of my childhood I miss . . .
—“Bertha, the Beautiful Telephone Girl”
Here’s a great web site about telephone exchange names.
And it wasn’t just a New York phenom. We had them here in Texas as well. Our number was ATlantic 5-XXXX (or AT5 for short) until the late 60’s, when it began to be referred to as the much more boring 285.
The exchanges usually referred to the switching station serving a particular area. Sometimes those stations were named for the area of town. Sometimes the names were just assigned by the phone company.
As far as having a number with fewer than 7 digits, in my grandmother’s small East Texas town (pop. 400), the phone numbers were technically 7 digits, but you had to dial only the last four if you were calling someone else in town.
And Eve, I think I love you.
I love you, too, Kepi, but don’t let APB know . . .
Telephone story: back in '81 or so, I was working in the garment district. We had to find our buyer, Joanna, who was at the Heaven Belt company. Seeing my chance, I grabbed the phone, dialed 411 and said to the operator, “Hello, Central, give me heaven, for Joanna’s there . . .”
Always wanted to do that.
My hometown was like this when I was a kid. You only had to dial the last 5 numbers of the local number you were calling. And this isn’t too long ago - it probably changed around 1976 or 77, I think.
Here in St. Louis, the phone exchanges were named (usually) for the streets the offices were located on, so exchanges like EVergreen, CHestnut, WYdown, etc. immediately told those in the know what part of town you were in.
Of course, there was always an AXminster to deal with, but hey, they had numbers they had to use up.
As for how the phone company could tell the difference between exchanges with identical numbers, like BAywatch and CEntral, that’s what the third number was for.
And like Kepi, when I lived in Paducah, KY in the 70s, we only had to dial the last 4 numbers if the other phone was in the same exchange. I was really ticked when they went to digital switching and we had to dial all seven numbers.
Oh yeah, I never thought it was just NYC. I know it used to be done everywhere; in my OP I was only wondering if it was still common in NY.
My number begins with 235…maybe I’ll start saying “BEnsonhurst” or “ADdison”, what the heck! Might be better if I can think of something that relates to where I live.
Prior to the mid-60s all phone exchanges had named. Where I grew up, it was SOuthold 5; the next town over was GReenport 7. BTW, if you dialed within an exchange you only needed the last four numbers.
Going back further, the exchanges were just the first two letters. I remember one Ellery Queen mystery from the 40s where the clue was that the victim dialed the murderer’s name on the phone, so it ruled out anyone with more than six letters. (Yes, six. Not seven.)
Actually, the GReenport exchange when I was growing up was very different from anything nowadays. It was a small town with less than 1000 phones, so each local phone had only three numbers. The phones did not have dials; just a blank area in the front. You’d pick them up and get a live operator and tell her the number (“477, please”). Calling into Greenport meant you dialed the operator and told what number you wanted. By the early 60s, though, they regularized everything.
Why drop it? It made it easier to add exchanges and you didn’t need to come up with a name to make it work (the names often had to be purely arbitrary – in Schenectady, NY, the exchanges were FRanklin – the name chosen because they wanted everything to begin with a “3”).
What I’d like to know is: Is there a master list of these names that AT&T or Bell (when they were only one big old company) used? I know from growing up in CA that 45 was GLenwood and 76 was POrter. Anybody else know of different 45’s or 76’s?
BTW, in the “old days” of all operator assisted calls in my home town in rural N. Ca., they used 4 digit numbers. When they ran out of these somehow (I don’t think the population was over 4000 until well after the introduction of the 7 digit you-dial numbers), they divided the town in half sort of arbitrarily (I believe the division was the river). To show how long ago that was, no one said anything about “black half” and “white half” being the designators. “Black 1234” was a different telephone in a different place than “white 1234”. But I forget if you were “black 1234” by having black numbers on a white background or vice versa. And no, I ain’t that old… I learned this from the town museum.
You can still make up your own exchanges—my current phone number would be at a “LEprosy 1” exchange, or perhaps “JEsus 1.”