SPring 7-1261, VIRginia 3-6308.

If the title of this post looks like some kind of code to you that’s because it is. Telephone Exchange Names were the standard for telephone numbers until the mid-1960s, when the Bell System phased them out in favor of 10-digit numbers. Dave Cook, a friend from the long-running food blog EatingInTranslation.com, wrote to share this photo of a very faded VIRginia exchange phone number painted on the wall of a funeral home in Richmond Hill, Queens. This one is a little hard to see so I added an enormous red arrow to pinpoint it.

VIRginia Exchange Name Sighting

The VIRginia exchange name sighting is somewhat unusual in that the first three letters of the word are capitalized. Typically only the first two letters are treated in that way. The only other example that I’ve seen of a three-letter exchange is the HAVemeyer exchange name used by the Charles Hoelzer Iron Works company.

I haven’t kept an eye out for this stuff lately, but for a while it seemed as if I was seeing these exchange names all over the place. It became one of those relics from the past that is right there in front of you if you open your eyes and realize what you are looking at.

A few weeks ago I spotted this SPring exchange name phone number at the Raffetto Corp, 144 West Houston. It was my first sighting of an old exchange name in almost a year.

SPring exchange, Raffetto Corp.

Dave Cook’s VIRginia sighting reminds me that I was in Maspeth last week, where I noticed that the Laurel Manufacturing Company finally got with the times and papered over its old TWinings exchange name phone number with its 20th century 10-digit equivalent. It took the company 50 years to get with the times. I was actually a little disappointed by this, since I find the enduring presence of these old phone numbers to be charming.

The TWinings phone number appeared twice on this sign. Today a full 10-digit phone number covers one of the numbers, and a web site URL covers the other.