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Telephone Exchange Names: Difference between revisions
the hotel is permanently closed
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Conversely, in a large, dense Atlanta or Toronto-sized city, one telephone central office was rarely able to cover more than a few local neighbourhoods. The copper to run wires from each subscriber's premises to the telco was expensive to deploy, so distances were kept to a minimum; there were also practical limitations on how many numbers would fit on a single switchboard. City-wide metropolitan coverage would therefore require many individual local offices in the largest communities, which would typically be named after streets or neighbourhoods in some locally-distinctive manner. A Montréal number might (before the late 1950s) have looked something like "ATwater 1234" where Atwater Avenue is a major street in that city. When the dial telephone became commonplace, this was dialed as the first two (or in some places, the first three) letters of the exchange name, followed by the digits. "ATwater 1234" would therefore be dialed as AT-1234, a six-digit call.
The longest local numbers of this era were seven dial pulls, in a handful of large communities like London or NYC. For example, Gamages store in Holborn, London UK was assigned "HOLborn 8484" (which, were it still extant, would be +44 20 7-HOL-8484) and the Hotel Pennsylvania near NYC's Penn Station was
Direct-dial distance calling became commonplace in the late 1950s; all of the existing North American-style numbers were lengthened to a three-digit area code and a seven-digit local number, usually written as two letters and five numbers (2L+5N). AT&T used a stock list of neutral but largely meaningless words as exchange names for small communities,<ref>While the Bell System tried to avoid actual place names on the generic AT&T list, occasionally one would slip past and get assigned in a way which doesn't fit local geography. There's a Liberty Village neighbourhood in Toronto (416) and a Wellington village in Prince Edward County (613), but those respective area codes assigned the "LIberty" and "WEllington" prefixes to Hamilton and Cornwall.</ref> so a number like 54x-xxxx would be written as LIx-xxxx with LI claimed to stand for "LIncoln" or "LIberty". These assignments were short-lived (typically
There was some ambiguity as the letters O, Q and Z either had no consistent dial placement ("O" was on the zero in France, while "MNO" is on the 6 in North America) or were simply not used. Any attempt to use the original pattern ("ring me on LIberty 5-6789") would likely only cause confusion today, as the letters on the telephone dials have been largely repurposed for other applications - such as vanity number "phonewords" where the caller dials the entire thing instead of just the first two letters (so L-I-B-E-R-T-Y as 542-3789, not 54x-xxxx). Second-generation mobile "flip phones" or "feature phones" occasionally used the letters on the dialpad for SMS texting (so 6-MNO, 7-PQRS, 9-WXYZ, requiring the user keep pressing 7777 until the "S" appears, then wait a second, then compose the next character...); that became obsolete with smart phones and touch screens. The original scheme is merely [[Forgotten Trope|a long-forgotten historical footnote.]]
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== [[Film]] ==
* ''[[Butterfield 8 (novel)|BUtterfield 8]]'' (1935 John O'Hera novel) and its companion [[Butterfield 8 (film)|Elizabeth Taylor film]] (1960) take their name from a block of landline numbers (now +1-212-BU8-xxxx) which served upper-class neighborhoods on Manhattan's Upper East Side.
* ''[[Back to the Future (film)|Back to the Future]]'' displays numbers in the KL5-5555 format in
* The 1985 comedy-horror film ''[[Transylvania 6-5000]]'' is titled with a shout-out to the song "PEnnsylvania 6-5000" (see below).
* The 1948 [[Film Noir]] movie ''[[Call Northside 777]]'' (starring [[Jimmy Stewart]]) uses an exchange name in its title.
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== [[Music]] ==
* "Pennsylvania 6-5000" (Glenn Miller Orchestra) is named for the telephone number of New York's Pennsylvania Hotel (+1-212-PE6-5000). Likely the [[Trope Codifier]], or at least the most famous example, even though the official title does not capitalize the E.
** 2600
** At one point, the hotel's phone system was configured to provide a list of options while a portion of the historic Glenn Miller tune played in the background.
** The hotel opened in 1919 and ceased operation on 1 April 2020, at the height of the Wuhan bat virus (COVID-19) pandemic. Vornado demolished the building to make way for yet another non-descript office building (so much for NY history). The number has been kept in service by moving it to an Internet telephone company - where it just returns a message that the hotel is permanently closed.
* At least three other songs that hit the charts used this device for their naming:
** "BEechwood 4-5789" by The Marvelettes (1962)
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