Back in March of 2010 I commenced a collection of Telephone Exchange Name Sightings. Like my interest in payphones, the exchange name sightings was another paean to telephone nostalgia in which I gathered photos and other relics of a faded era in telephony.
Recently a friend, Ivy Nguyen, sent over this nice photo of an old telephone exchange name sighting in Philadelphia.
“HO” might have stood for HObart, HOlmesburg, HOuser, or Howard, this According to the Telephone Exchange Name Project, a long-time favorite web site which proved invaluable to me in figuring out what these mysterious-looking codes mean. In these modern times the above-seen phone number would be (215) 467-2250.
Before area codes and “All Number Dialing” it was common, when placing a phone call, to pick up a phone and ask the operator for “PEnnsylvania-6-5300”, for instance. One might have called that number in 1942, if they wanted to advertise on this empty billboard in Times Square:
By the mid-1960s the exchange names were phased out, though vestiges of these old phone numbers have lingered in public spaces over the passing decades.
I mostly look for these old phone numbers on buildings and faded signs, but I also look on New York City matchbook covers bearing the old phone numbers. The above (amazing full-color) photo of Times Square in 1942 is from my collection of old family slides.
My goal with this project is to find a physical relic of every telephone exchange name used in the 5 boroughs of New York City. In addition to signs, buildings, and matchbooks I also mine my collections of old magazines, old slides and family photos found at thrift shops and auctions, and other sources.
Ivy’s photo of the Philadelphia HO exchange number inspired me to re-build my collection of Exchange Name Sightings, which disappeared from the Internet in November after a disk failure wiped out that project and thousands of other pages from my web sites. It has been a pretty rough couple of months in SorabjiLand*, since that disk failure erased so many things, including full web sites which exhausted hundreds of hours of work to create. It will be some time before I fully recover from that incident, but in the meantime I move forward with new projects and content. (*I call this “SorabjiLand” because my screenname and login ID has, since the early 1990s, virtually always been “sorabji” at every BBS, web site, and Interactive Service at which I registered. Sorabji.com is my home web site at which most of my other projects originate (this one included), though at the moment, on account of the disk failure wipeout, much of what used to be at Sorabji.com is gone and probably never coming back.)
The collection of exchange name sightings is mostly restored, though it will be a while before I re-annotate all the images with information about which exchange names are present and where they are located. I thank Ivy for inspiring me to rebuild that project, which I look forward to continuing. I hope you will enjoy the Exchange Name Sightings, and stay tuned to the Payphone Project for more interesting things from the world of payphones.