This one almost got away from me. At a glance the vertically-oriented text at the far right of this image looked like “JONES” followed by a regular phone number, albeit sans the area code.
BOulevard-1-9500. Jones Surgical Company, Old Exchange Name Phone Number
Then I thought, if that’s an old phone number from before the (718) area code was in use then it’s a strange looking number from that era. For technical reasons I read about once (and which completely elude me now) the first three numbers of the old 7-digit numbers could not use zero as the second digit until decades later. So this number, which looked like 801-9500, didn’t seem right.
Jones Surgical, Old Phone Number, Closer Look
Then I noticed the dash between what I thought was the zero and the one, and saw that this must be a BO telephone exchange name number in the old style. I had never seen a BO exchange before. I looked it up later at the estimable phone.net46.net and learned that this new-to-me exchange name was BOulevard.
BOulevard-1-9500. Jones Surgical Company.
I spotted this old format phone number last week at the Jones Surgical Supply Company, 101-21 Metropolitan Avenue at 71st/Continental Avenue in Queens. Keep up with my never-ending collection of Telephone Exchange Name phone numbers still seen in the wild of New York and occasionally elsewhere.
