and your old exchange would have been Prescott or Prospect. The Garfield Ridge area where I lived had Ludlow, Portsmouth and Reliance exchanges as I recall.
When I was a kid ours was [b]BR[/b]iargate 4. We took it with us when we moved a few blocks away and my parents had it until they retired and moved out of the neighborhood. The common ones in our area where [b]AR[/b]dmore 1, [b]LO[/b]ngbeah 1, [b]RA[/b]venswood 8, [b]HO[/b]llycourt 5, and [b]RO[/b]gers Park 4. I remember an occasional [b]BI[/b]ttersweet and [b]UP[/b]town as well. I always wondered what the location scheme was. They seem to be area specific, but why didn't everyone on the same block have the same exchange?
A lot of it had to do with time....I believe numbers with different exchanges were given out over time, and then some of the older numbers were reused. I still have the same PALlisade telephone number that my parents first got in 1953! I can even remember my grandfather's store number, MONroe1466, and our old family doctor's number, CAPitol 7570.
A lot of people in Hyde Park still have the old phones from that era - I have one that came with my apartment which has the old exchange listed. My mom tried to call "the phone company" back in the day and called from our neighbors who still only had that on their phone.. Poor Ernestine didn't have a good day with that.
Heh, I still have the same telephone number that my parents got in 1953, and if you think that's nuts, I still have the same license plate number that my grandfather originally got on his 1928 Hupmobile. The plate went to my father in 1940, and then when he passed away, I got the number reassigned in 1996. When I eventually buy an old car, I will be able to put a plate on the car from the year it was manufactured that will register back to me. I have all of the old plates back to 1940!
We were a MIchigan 2 number, a northside prefix, but somehow often got wrong numbers for a southside walgreens. They might have been MIdway 3 with the same 4digits as ours. My first all-number phone was 66x-6x66....always thought it was a good thing i didn't lisp.