My 212 number is YUkon 2. The exchange was retired as a spoken name sometime in the 1960s, when the phone company finished converting the system from alphanumeric to pure digits, and the YU that used to stand at the front of every Upper West Side number became a 9 and an 8 on a rotary dial. The number remained the same. What changed was the meaning. YUkon 2-8888 was an address. 982-8888 is a string of digits.
When I attended graduate school at Columbia University in the City of New York in the late 1980’s, one of chits of living on the Morningside Heights Campus — believe it or not — was getting a phone number with a 212 Area Code. I know that may sound silly to some, but if you had a 212 phone number, that meant you lived in the exclusive borough of Manhattan, and you were desirable and important and to be envied by the rest of the world.
Continue reading → Tutorial: How to Get a 212 Area Code Phone Number
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