Listening to a song and the lyric is East two nine, rather than east twenty nine.
Also I’ve seen on TV shows where they say precinct two seven rather than twenty seven.
Is this a common way to say numbers in NYC?
Must be to scan for that song. It’s thoity thoid and thoid, not three three and third.
Forty second street. Fourteenth Street. Etc.
Not in general, no.
I believe that calling precinct 27 “the two-seven” is police jargon, based on many cop shows on TV. I don’t know if if the jargon is local to New York cops.
I’ve never heard a street called either “East two nine” or “East twenty nine”. It is always the ordinal, “East twenty-nineth”.
yes it could be two nine fit the song better. The song is People Who Died by Jim Carroll band
Agreed, I think it’s a music/tv thing; never heard it in real life. It seems to be really prevalent in sports, too; in All or Nothing, the documentary about football teams, coaches usually call their players Two Five, for example.
In general, the ordinal is always used. IME the only time you’ll ever hear numbers said as individual digits is when extra clarity is required, for example sometimes you’ll hear subway conductors announce “B train to one-two-five” instead of “one twenty-fifth.”
Apart from clarity, there exists a subtle distinction between numbers and numerals. If you add precinct 27 to precinct 28, you don’t get precinct 55.
It may have a subtle effect on the way people think about and deal with ‘numbers’.
The distinction is often noticed when working with database values: confusion and errors result from recording phone numbers or serial numbers or social security numbers as numbers, even though that is often the most efficient way.
I’m not a Newyawker, but I know that describing numbers, letters, or words over a communications system can be different from normal conversation. You might say “one niner three five” over the radio to avoid being misunderstood, which could have serious consequences if the ambulance goes to the wrong address. Consider the phonetic alphabet. This undoubtedly carries over to ordinary speech.
I have nothing to add except that I recognized the lyric immediately and for some reason it never seemed strange to me (that is until you mentioned it 
)
I’m a former NYer though not a native one, and I do recall hearing and using that form sometimes–I think it was mostly in taxis, with the driver confirming that my drunkenly slurred “87th and Lex” was "eight seven and Lex and not “eight two and Lex.” I think I did the same with drivers whose English was limited.
Also from a song:
Going up to Lexington
One two five
Feel sick and dirty more dead than alive