That was my family phone number for 50 years.

Not 212 753 9285. 

PL3-9285.

PL for PLAZA, meaning midtown east.

My dad’s office phone was JU2-1455.  JU meant Judson for midtown west.  There was MU for Murray Hill, etc. GR for Gramercy Park.  POB (partner of blogger)’s home phone was GR3-9119.

And it wasn’t just a series of numbers, but it located you in area of town.  Like old-fashioned GPS.  Your phone number made you less anonymous.  And you couldn’t take your home or business number with you if you moved across town. Wires and technology couldn’t handle that.  So, if you had a GR or MU or JU or PL number, you lived or worked in a geographically defined area.

And our zip code was 22, not 10022.  In the 1960s, you didn’t need five-digit zip codes, let alone the new nine digit ones.

Of course, some people (very few still alive) remember 6-digit phone numbers. They probably think I am late to the game of recognizing the lost nuances of day-to-day life in New York City.

But, today, I came across my birth announcement, among the memorabilia that I, as family archivist, need to preserve.  And it held more information than the fact of my birth (as a result of which my family was forever changed — some say for the better, others say “not so much”).  It captured a time and place in New York in the 1960s, where my family’s PL prefix in our phone number and our home address reflected upward mobility, into places where Jews mostly couldn’t find apartments.  It also suggest certain life that fashioned after JFK’s Camelot (at least until private school tuition kicked in).

The 60s gave way to the 70s and the urban decay.  Then came the late 70s, 80s and 90s and urban renewal and soaring population growth.  The end of the 20th century and first decade of the 21st gave rise to untold fortunes and a sea change in the socio-economic-racial-cultural urban landscape.

The nuances of numbers and two-digit zip codes were irrelevant and unworkable even in the late 70s.  Every now and again, I see a decades-old advertisement on a building that time forgot (until the lot next to it was demolished to build a high-rise) that has a six-digit phone number with a prefix that refers to a neighborhood.

And I think, I was born in a small town.  I was raised in small town.  It just got big and anonymous during my lifetime.  And these strangers don’t know the secrets of my small town.

And that’s good enough for me.