Hello, Manhattan? I Live Here!
By Shashi Tharoor
Newsweek International
January 10, 2005

So, what do you want for Christmas?" my friend Bob asked his teenage daughter, Ashley.

"Daddy," she replied, "get me a 212 area code."

Bob swears this is true. This being Manhattan, I don't doubt it. Ashley is one of those pert-nosed, blond-maned teen princesses you normally see only on TV. Bob's a Wall Street mover and shaker, accustomed to getting what he (or his daughter) wants. But this wish had him stymied.

It seems the apple of his eye had been shaken to her core by the realities of life in the Big Apple. She had just taken her first off-campus apartment at the university and applied for her own phone line. All very cool, for her age bracket. So you can imagine her horror at the phone number she was assigned--beginning with the decidedly uncool digits 646. "But I live in Manhattan!" Ashley wailed. "That makes me a 212!"

Ever since area codes were invented, 212 has been the automatic signifier of elite New York status. Mention your phone number, and people everywhere immediately had to acknowledge your place in the greatest city on earth. The snob value of 212 soared in 1985 when the powers that be succumbed to the immutable laws of supply and demand--too many phones, too few numbers--and deprived three of the city's five boroughs of the coveted prefix. Residents of Brooklyn, Queens and Staten Island were henceforth relegated to 718. (I'm told that real-estate values in those boroughs promptly plunged.) In 1993 the Bronx was forced to follow suit. For a heady decade, 212 was reserved exclusively for Manhattanites. Everyone else was the lowly "bridge-and-tunnel crowd," to be shunned.

Bob remembers. "When I was dating Ashley's mom," he says, "she had another suitor wooing her ardently. Then the phone company switched him to 718, and it was game over. She stopped returning his calls." Who'd want to dial 11 digits to reach Jack when Bob was a mere seven digits away? A psychology of distance took effect, and more. Being in the domain put you a cut above the rest. By default, Bob became a 212 alpha male.

The mating game is no longer so easy. Blame it on the Internet. With the explosion of dial-up Web access, followed closely by the cell-phone era, it was only a matter of time before the supply of 212s once again ran out. First the phone company invented a third area code, 917, so that mobiles would not add to the strain on Manhattan's 212 land lines. When that wasn't enough, New York finally cracked: Manhattan residents would have to accept a fourth area code, 646.

The change was wrenching. Panicked snobs tried to get the new number confined to an unfashionable part of the island: Harlem and points north. Sensibly, the authorities demurred--646 would be equitably allocated to new phone lines anywhere in the city, just like 212. For good measure they decreed that all New Yorkers, in whichever borough they lived, would have to dial all 11 digits to get their local calls through. Even if you were a Manhattanite dialing a fellow 212, you'd have to punch 1, then the area code, then the number, as if you lived in Queens. Or Nome.

Personally, I don't mind. I've grown used to the pluralism of the city phone system. My office phone's a 212, my home phone a 646, and my cell a 917.

"So what are you going to do for Ashley?" I asked Bob mere days before the holiday.

"The only thing possible," the doting father replied, opting for the second coolest telephonic option in New York. "I'll pay to make hers an unlisted number."