This is perhaps one of the most useful “Resurrectionist Posts” (in the Burke and Hare sense) I have seen. The Wikipedia article on the eponymous song states that the Pennsylvania Hotel claims it is “the oldest phone number in New York City.” I think we can give that claim tentative recognition, as NYC has a coterie of fact-ferrets as assiduous as the Dope and Snopes in debunking false claims. (Witness Safire’s “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil…” columns.) Also from the Wikipedia article – we can set frames to the age of the number in this way: The first 2L-5N seven-digit NYC phone numbers were assigned in 1930, so that would be the terminus ante quem, while the song was a hit in 1940, the terminus p[ost quem.
The questions then beconme:
Is PE6-5000 in fact the oldest still-extant NYC phone number?
Is there an older number still in use somewhere else?
My grandparents bought the house I live in now when it was first built in 1953 or 1954. It then went to my parents, and now to me. It’s had the same phone number from the very beginning. I think that’s a pretty good run.
According to my father, the people who got the smallest numbers were the most unhappy when they went to more digits, because of all the zeros that were added. On the rotary phones, zeros took the longest to time to dial, so adding three leading zeros to their number added a significant amount of time.
Likewise. My parents bought the house in which I live in 1957, and I inherited the phone number along with the house. Unfortunately, the area code changed. But coming up 54 years in February isn’t bad.
Yes, but… as the “Time Warp” lyrics go - “Not for very much longer”.
Actually, I was surprized to read that the Hotel Pennsylvania has NOT been torn down yet - Vornado has owned the property for several years now, and has had plans to redevelop the site for as long - according to Wiki, they have most of the approvals they need, and while I knew there has been some haggling as to the size of the proposed building (since IIRC it’s planned to be as tall as the Empire State Building), I thought the Hotel was already closed and interior salvage operations begun - well, maybe next year.
The plan to redevelop the Pennsylvania Hotel site will be quite helpful as it will include reopening the ‘Gimbels’ passenge, restoring direct underground (hence all weather) passage between Penn Station and Herald Square (the PATH 33rd station, among other things), which is really useful. The phone number, not sure what would happen to that.
I think thats an important distinction. My understanding is that a phone number is:
(area code) exchange-number. When we changed from 213 to 818, we considered ourselves to have the same number just a different area code. So for a number to stay the same, does it have to be area code, exchange and number; exchange and number; or just the number?
The largest non-RBOC* ILEC** was GTE and it was merged into Verizon years ago. However, there are hundreds of non-Bell ILECs still in existence. Ohio by itself has more than 40, almost all of them being “rural phone companies.”
*RBOC - Regional Bell Operating Company - originally, Ameritech, Bell Atlantic, BellSouth, Nynex, Pacific Telesis, Southwestern Bell, and U S West - now, AT&T, Verizon, Frontier, and Qwest.
Because the phone system used the first two letters of the word, not the abbreviation of the word (which in the thirties would have been Penn. or Penna., as two-letter state abbreviations weren’t standardized until the late sixties or so).
Hence PE for Pennsylvania, MU for Murry Hill, etc.
Just as I was asking myself why that bit of information seemed so familiar, I realized it was the first thing referenced in the link **Phil **posted earlier.
Wow! Lots of life here … thanks for your responses to my first-ever comment here
I’ll add a few more tidbits:
It’s true that the Pennsylvania Hotel number goes back before 1930. I love that 1924 gem you found! Note that the hotel itself was built in 1919 and it is likely they’ve had that number from the beginning.
Once upon a time, I worked for ROLM, the “computer phone company” and was responsible for ensuring our equipment was compliant with all standards. (My arenas of work: the first digital telephones, T1 interfaces and more.)
Here’s what might be of interest, and related to this thread: at the time I was doing that work, in 1979-81, we still had to maintain compliance with every generation of telephone switching equipment still in use.
The oldest switches still in use at that time? A central office exchange in New York City dating back to 1896. The only thing that had been upgraded was the “message unit” (long distance toll) counters, aka “message registers.” There was a huge wall of mechanical-digital counters (a bit like an odometer), one for each phone line. To read them, a computer-controlled TV camera was mounted on an X-Y plane and scanned everyone’s meter readings! I couldn’t believe it. But… we still had to be compliant… and did so.
Inspired by this thread, I searched a bit for photos of what I’ve just described, and came up empty.
In any case, what we’re discussing here may be some of the longest running examples of continuously-used 20th century technology that has changed very little over the decades.
