The telephone number remains, by my estimation, an especially peculiar unit of currency. Most of us have one. Some of us have several. Depending on the purpose of the number some of us want it publicized, others do not. It is not unlike a private part, which some of us subtly flaunt while others demure from drawing attention to that very direct line of communication. Nothing quite captures one’s attention or raises anticipations like a ringing telephone.

I bore this in mind in pursuit of what some might consider a coveted phone number. It had lingered at the not-so-far-back of my mind since the 1990s, when Allan Bridge passed and the main telephone number for his Apology Project slipped into the clutches of a spammer. For I don’t know how many years calls to 212-255-2748 went to an automated answering system peddling subscriptions to DirectTV, Dish Network, or whatnot. The services offered changed any time I called but the fundamental remained: Someone was cashing in on the notoriety of that phone number, which was widely publicized from October 20, 1980; until and beyond August, 1995.

212-255-2748 was the first and primary phone number for the Apology Line, a telephone confessional created by Allan Bridge on October 20, 1980, and maintained until his death on August 5, 1995. I discovered Apology in January, 1991, upon reading a memorable article in the New York Press, a free weekly newspaper. I was living at the Parc Lincoln Hotel at the time. I passed many midnight hours in the hotel lobby phone booths listening to tales of torment and regret from people who called Apology to describe ghastly acts and dastardly deeds. Having arrived in New York in October, 1990, Apology became an early steady presence in my adult life, a continuous source for some kind of reassurance. I checked in on it almost religiously. I was afraid of church but not so much Apology, which let me dip in and out of murky worlds from discrete distances.

I became involved with Apology in 1993, an experience I more-or-less documented in an earlier post: The Apology Line Revisited. Apology’s environment revolved around anonymity, so I took it as a badge of honor to be the first Apology caller Allan ever met in person. I think my involvement with the project lasted about a year, maybe less. While it did not end horribly between Allan and me it did not end especially well, but I bore no grudges and I don’t think he did, either.

Over the years I would call 212-255-2748, just for the hell of it, as if looking for a ghost. I don’t know if I ever articulated the desire but somewhere in the back of this head I must have contemplated acquiring it if/when it became available. For years the number connected to a spammy automated service but at some point in the last couple of years 212-255-2748 was dropped by the spammy owners and acquired by an individual. Whoever had that number seems to have given it up pretty quickly, leading me to think maybe they let it go on account of receiving unwanted calls associated with the old Apology line.

I knew these kind of calls would come in and indeed, not long after I secured the number came this message from someone who wanted to say he was sorry, for what we will never know:

I would think that the circle of people who called Apology back in the day and who might have had a morbid curiosity in calling the old phone number today have moved on from that thinking by now. But talk of Apology lingers in the culture, and every now and again a call comes in from a curiosity seeker who encountered the phone number somewhere out there.

I did not and do not intend to revive anything Apology-like at 212-255-2748. There are countless other outlets for that kind of thing now, and I would not want the responsibility of harvesting peoples’ transgressions. As of this writing calls made to 212-255-2748 are routed to my Payphone Radio Shoutcast stream. There is no option to leave a voicemail message. For that I make no apologies.

HOW DID I GET THAT NUMBER?

As of late October calls to 212-255-2748 returned three beeps and the familiar automated message saying the number was not in service. My first thought was to find some way to port the number but of course you cannot do that with a number you do not own.

If a phone number that you desire is not in service then acquiring it should be as simple as calling the phone company that owns it and asking them for it. In that respect my path to acquiring this phone number came with a bit of luck. Twilio and other sources seemed to agree that the number I wanted belonged to Verizon. That was fortunate for me since I get Fios internet through Verizon. All I had to do, I thought, was request that VOIP telephone service be added to my Fios account, but only if I could get the 212-255-2748 phone number.

Had 212-255-2748 been owned by AT&T or some other telco I guess I would have had to do something like set up a burner phone on the other carrier, request the number, then port it to something like Google Voice or Skype. Who knows what luck I would have had going that route.

The first customer service rep at Verizon verified that the number was available, and that I could have it. Somehow I didn’t think it would be that simple. It wasn’t. About an hour after the customer service rep said this I got a call from someone named Howard, at Verizon. Howard was the individual who actually deployed and activated phone numbers. He asked me, point blank, what this was about, this business of me requesting a random-seeming phone number. He was nice enough, even getting a laugh out of it, but he said my request looked really odd.

I was not trying to be secretive about my intentions. I just wasn’t ready for a call like this from the bowels of Verizon’s phone number department. I told him the number used to connect to an art project I worked on years ago, and that I intended to revive the number for continued use in that spirit. I did not explain the details of its past use as a telephone confessional. I thought he might think that was too weird.

Howard remained bemused and confused by my request but said he would think about it and get back to me. That was Friday afternoon. He added that “the system” was preventing him from activating the number, and he did not think it had been out of service long enough for it to be reassigned. I asked if there was any manual override of this but I don’t think he answered. I added that getting this number mattered enough to me that I would mark my calendar with the day the number became available so I could request it at that time. Howard did not know when that day would come, nor could he say for certain how long a phone number was supposed to be out of service before someone else could have it.

I waited through the weekend. Howard called back on Monday, relenting, saying that since it was intended for use in an art project that I could have it, regardless of however long the embargo on unassigned numbers was supposed to last. He did some magic to force the number back into service and assigned it to my Fios account.

I told him this number got wide publicity over the years. He asked “So if I type this number into a search engine I’ll find something?” I said yes. He did that and said “Look at that, the Apology Line. That’s pretty cool.”

I am not one to geek out over phone numbers but in that moment I do not think I could have been happier. I mean this isn’t just any old phone number. It felt like a heist, or a coup. But truth be told the number was up for grabs and I got it fair and square, with a little help from Howard at Verizon.

Phone numbers in the (212) area code are supposed to be hard to come by without paying at least $125 each. I did not pay anything for this one. To further seal the deal, and without anybody informing me, Verizon for some reason upped my internet bandwidth from 150/150 to 400/400. I’m seeing real upload/download speeds of 550/550, at no extra charge. Thanks, Verizon!

For a couple of days I had 212-255-2748 plugged into my payphone, which brought a certain noir element into this living room. Payphones were integral to the culture of anonymity at Apology, a fact I took for granted during my involvement with the project but rediscovered years later when I found my stash of Apology-related papers and ephemera. This was long after I established this website, which is called The Payphone Project as a direct shoutout to the Apology Project.

212-255-2748 is now the official phone number of The Payphone Project.