Vintage hood

Since so much of Hillcrest seems to be disappearing into new development , I like capturing images and evidence of what once was.

I'm old enough to remember when references to phone numbers shifted from a named exchange and the last four digits to all digits.

This is a very different animal from that all too annoying chose a phone number with digits that spell something -- cute but we all still have to translate the letters back into numbers since the basic phone "number" is still a 3 letters assigned to each number on the key pad affair.

Ma Bell had approved/suggested names for different exchanges so the 295-7649 of Mary Lou's pace was probably Cypress-5 as in 295-7649. In another geographic place it might have been shown as AX5 standing for Axminster 5 or Axtell 5. The exchanges are gone and Ma Bell's babies have long since left the building but I'm not the only fan as the Telephone Name Exchange project seeks to document and rekindle phone number exchange usage.

Reusing the old exchange names and creating new ones is an appealing idea that I can get behind.

Some memorable exchanges I can recall are Parkway-4, Garfield-1 (Cleveburg reference as in Garfield-1 2323)