I hadn’t spotted an old telephone exchange name phone number since December, when I saw another NIghtingale number in Carroll Gardens. I did see an ILlinois number at the 61st Street LIRR station in Woodside in March but that had been pointed out to me by a friend. I prefer the small thrill of discovering these things serendipitously. Yesterday’s NIghtingale phone number once belonged to Gentile’s Fence, a company which no longer seems to exist. The format of the number is unusual. A more typical format would have been NI9-3590, NI-9-3590, or even NIghtingale 9-3590. I don’t remember ever seeing a phone number formatted this way. If I didn’t already know that NI stood for NIghtingale I might not have even realized what this string of letters and numbers meant.
NI. 93590. Gentile’s Fence. Flushing.
