DIAL AGAIN.(digits proliferate in phone calling - New York City)(Column)

Verizon has applied the branding iron, and starting this week everybody in Manhattan must punch in a 1 and then a 212 (or a 646 or 917) in front of the old local number before talking to his or her office or bookie or life companion or dog-walker or newspaper-delivery service (where was our Post yesterday?). It's not such a big deal--I already knew I was a 212--but eleven numbers instead of seven are now required to bring about a conversation, which means a further lowering of the gray digit cloud that hangs over each of us, Pig Pen-like, from the moment we get up in the morning to the time we brush our teeth at night. The added numbers also signal the end of my hopes that the phone company might someday see the error of its integer infatuation and turn back to the exchange letters and (before that) the sprightly full exchange names that once identified us. I've lived at the same Manhattan address for thirty years and in that span have gone from a LEhigh 4 prefix to LE 4 to 534 and now to 1-212-534, which is the wrong direction. Yes, there are zillions more number variations now available than what can be wrung out of those puny alphabet groups jammed onto your Touchtone, but let's try harder. Why not some fresh exchanges instead? Why not WEevil 3? What about OSiris 4? What's wrong with LUst 7, BOwwow 9, or LInoleum 6? The number I know best, next to my own, belongs to our friends Allan and Marie, who have converted their drab, Upper West Side 496-5844 into the mnemonic GYM LUGG.

I'm an old New York guy, and can recall the day in 1930 when our Atwater 8435 took an extra digit and became ATwater 9-8435. Growing up, I began to apprehend that Manhattan telephone exchanges, which were geographically assigned, were a guide map and social register to my delightful city. West Side school friends of mine could be reached at the MOnument or CAthedral or RIverside exchange. My father worked at the WHitehall exchange, down near Wall Street, and my mother at the mid-West Forties' BRyant 9. BUtterfield 8 was just south of us on the Upper East Side, with TRafalgar, REgent, and RHinelander not far away. When my parents were divorced and my mother moved to East Eighth Street, she became a SPring 7, and neighbors and stores and movie theatres in that neighborhood had lively ALgonquin, CHelsea, and WAtkins handles. If you called up one of the Times Square movie theatres, to find the next showtime for "Cimarron" or "Rasputin and the Empress," the exchange was probably LOngacre. In my ...