{"id":3085,"date":"2014-08-11T17:44:20","date_gmt":"2014-08-11T21:44:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/181.sorabji.com\/?p=3085"},"modified":"2014-08-11T17:44:20","modified_gmt":"2014-08-11T21:44:20","slug":"spring-7-1261-virginia-3-6308","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/2014\/08\/11\/spring-7-1261-virginia-3-6308.html","title":{"rendered":"SPring 7-1261, VIRginia 3-6308."},"content":{"rendered":"

\t\t\t\tIf the title of this post looks like some kind of code to you that’s because it is. Telephone Exchange Names<\/a> were the standard\u00a0for telephone numbers until the mid-1960s, when the Bell System phased them out in favor of 10-digit numbers. Dave Cook<\/strong><\/a>, a friend from the long-running food blog EatingInTranslation.com<\/a><\/strong>,\u00a0wrote to share this photo of a very faded VIRginia exchange phone number\u00a0painted on the wall of a funeral home in Richmond Hill, Queens. This one is a little \u00a0hard to see so I added an enormous red arrow to pinpoint it.<\/p>\n

\"VIRginia<\/a>

VIRginia Exchange Name Sighting<\/p><\/div>\n

The VIRginia exchange name sighting is somewhat unusual in\u00a0that the first three letters of the word are capitalized. Typically only the first two letters are\u00a0treated 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<\/a>.<\/p>\n

I haven’t kept an eye out for this stuff lately, but\u00a0for a while it seemed as if I was seeing these exchange names all over the place. It became\u00a0one of those relics from the past\u00a0that is right there in front of you if you open your eyes and realize what you are looking at.<\/p>\n

A few weeks ago I spotted this\u00a0SPring exchange name phone number at the Raffetto Corp, 144 West Houston. It was my\u00a0first sighting of an old exchange name in almost a year.<\/p>\n

\"SPring<\/a>

SPring exchange, Raffetto Corp.<\/p><\/div>\n

Dave Cook’s VIRginia\u00a0sighting 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<\/a> with its 20th century 10-digit equivalent. It took the company\u00a050 years to\u00a0get with\u00a0the times. I was actually a little disappointed by this, since I find the enduring presence of these old phone numbers to be charming.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

\"Laurel

Laurel Manufacturing, modern phone number & web site URL.<\/p><\/div>\n

 \t\t<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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\u00a0for 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,\u00a0wrote to share this photo […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":20282,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3085","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-digital-hoarding","et-has-post-format-content","et_post_format-et-post-format-standard"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/08\/VIRginia_exchange_Richmond_Hill1-1.jpg?fit=640%2C427&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/paumAn-NL","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3085","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3085"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3085\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/20282"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3085"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3085"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3085"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}