oregon seven, fiave, fiave, fiave, fiave

As Bob and I have notified friends and acquaintances of our new address and phone number, we can tell the dyed-in-the-wool New Yorkers by the way they congratulate us--not for finally owning something of our own, or for the great Village location, or for surviving a year of bad contractors. No, the true old-time New Yorkers have congratulated us for getting a 212 area code.

Area code is an issue for Manhattanites. I remember, years ago before cell-phones introduces the 917 and 646 area codes to the City, when I was teaching at an often-pretentious Upper East Side private school, there was brief talk of addressing the expanding demand for phone numbers by changing the Upper East Side area code from 212 to 718. The parents at the school (and probably every Upper East Side private school) were in an uproar. I actually heard one of them cry out (as if she were being denied food or water), "I pay good money to have my 212 area code!" and several others murmured in distraught agreement.

The issue, for those of you outside metropolitan NYC, is that 212 is the earliest area code for Manhattan and Manhattan only, while 718 has always been that of the "outer boroughs" of Brooklyn, Bronx, Queens and Staten Island, giving 212 a status that Manhattanites, from Wall Street to the Bowery to Hell's Kitchen to Inwood, could take pride in. The old-moneyed Upper-East-Siders would have been forced to mumble their area code under their breath to the sales girl at Bloomingdales or the Admissions counselor at Brearley had the phone company resolved the issue by expanding the 718 area code to encompass their already hoity-toity "BUtterfield-8" phone exchange.

As it turns out, Bob simply asked if there were any 212 numbers available when he set up the new phone. He was given a few options and selected one similar to 677-5555 because he liked the sound of it. (I made up the 5555 part, so please don't call that number. It won't be me.) Had I been involved, I might have done some quick research into the old phone exchanges for Manhattan before selecting a number.

For those of you who aren't old enough to remember where you were when John F. Kennedy was shot (I was in Kindergarten and am thus the last of the generation that remembers), the old phone exchanges were actually words, names representing the areas within a city or county. One would actually dial the first two letters of the name of the area followed by four or five numerical digits. When I started grade school in Kansas City in the early 1960s, my phone number was SOuth 1-5555, which was dialed as SO-1-5555. By the time I was in junior high the letters had been dropped and the number was simply 761-5555 (again, not the real number, so leave those poor people alone).

Movies and music made some exchanges in New York City famous, like "PEnnsylvania-6500," "BUtterfield-8," "MUrray Hill," "YUkon," "KLondike" and "GRamercy." It turns out that our new phone number actually corresponds to a couple of the original exchanges on the mid and Lower East Side: first "ORchard" in the Orchard Street area and later "ORegon" which covered most of the entire east side of Manhattan from the Brooklyn Bridge at Chamber's Street up to about 37th Street near Grand Central Station. There were other exchanges within this area, and the area around our new apartment had several. "ALgonquin" covered the area around Cooper Square (very near our home), and "CHelsea" and "SPring" were used in the West Village, named more for their neighbors to the north and south than for the immediate area. And of course downtown's own chic area exchange was "GRamercy" for Gramercy Park, just above Union Square.

At any rate, just talking about all of this makes me want to answer my home phone with my best old-time operator voice, "Oregon seven, fiave, fiave, fiave, fiave." But it's also interesting to learn more about the history of this city. Before Manhattanites worried about their 212 clout, they had actually dealt with phone exchange clout. Novelist Daniel Akst wrote of his New York childhood for a Los Angeles Times article:

"New York City, like most of the country, was divided into a variety of [phone exchanges], and they could say as much about you as your accent, which believe me said plenty. 'ORegon' was, well, the wilderness. 'BUtterfield 8,' by contrast, was the much tonier telecommunications precinct immortalized by John O'Hara and later Elizabeth Taylor. 'MUrray Hill' was pretty good too, although there was one of these in New Jersey as well."

I know my "SOuth" exchange growing up told locals that I not only was from Kansas City, Missouri, but from a part of Kansas City, Missouri that had been cow pastures only ten years earlier. My new "ORegon" number may say nothing to 90% of the population of Manhattan, but to those few, I live in that "wilderness" area that developed piecemeal between the Financial district at Canal Street and the land of the Butterfields east of Olmstead's Central Park. My 212 area code may make some think that I've been in New York for several decades, but probably not for long, as other area codes get introduced and filled up and the whole world goes cellular.

If you'd like to do a little research on your own phone exchange, go to http://ourwebhome.com/TENP/Times.html. You can look up your current number, but if you haven't lived there for long, I'd suggest you try your mother or grandmother's old phone numbers as well. It may spark a conversation with an older relative ("older" meaning over 50) about your origins and what people thought about you based on where you grew up.