Old Chicago Numbering

I've been having a discussion with a friend in Chicago about the numbering employed there in the past. Knowing that we have Pat and a few others who are familiar with the history of the city, I'm sure somebody might be able to shed some more light on this.

I know from previous comments here that Chicago switched from 3L-4N to

2L-5N somewhere in the late 1940s, but my friend recalls that when he started with Illinois Bell around 1960 there were still phones around showing alternate schemes, either 2L-4N or possibly just name plus 4 digits.

At first I wondered if the city had indeed used some sort of 6-digit numbering and these were just older phones which had never had their number plates updated, but upon reflection he reckons they may have been manual offices.

So can anyone recall how widespread manual offices still were in Chicago around 1960-ish?

A few of his comments:

Could be that the changeover came in with X-bar. The office I worked > in was built in the early fifties with the X-bar as the original > equipment. The old Central Office on Western and North Avenues was > turned into a Plant Department training center and I never saw the kind > of equipment which was in it originally. Might be it was an old manual > office - "Number please." > We still had an office like this when I started with the company as a > mailboy in 1960. One of the offices I deleivered mail to was on Ogden > Avenue just west of Central Park Avenue - the old Lawndale Office - the > new Central Office (#1 X-bar) was built two blocks east of Central Park > on the southwest corner of St. Louis avenue where I delivered mail > also. > So it could be that all those number plates I saw on phones were > remnants of a manual office and not a switched office. Didn't think of > that before we started this but that makes sense to me and would > account for the discrepancies. In fact, I now feel certain that is the > explanation.

Also mentioned was the Edgewater office on the north side of Chicago where he worked mid-1960s. From his description is sounds like it was a panel office at that time, or "monkey-on-a-stick" as he says they referred to it!

We also got to talking about Strowger SxS switches:

I would imagine local central offices for Illinois Bell might have used > SXS at some point, but, by the time I got to the field in the late > sixties, the only place I ever saw them was in PBXes. They were fun to > work on though - a real challenge sometimes.

Pat,

I recall you mentioning the Wabash office ("The Wabash Cannonball") being SxS at one time. Which part of the city did that serve, and do you have any idea when it was replaced?

All info will be passed on to help reconcile old memories!

Thanks,

-Paul.

[TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: The 'Wabash CannonBall' a/k/a Wabash central office was one of the first, if not the first, central offices in Chicago, dating from the early 1900's; it served part of the downtown business district, which in those days (early 1900's, late 1800's) was a wee bit south of the present 'downtown' area; 'downtown' tended to be more around Harrison/Van Buren Streets (east/west streets) and Wabash Avenue. Chicago, after the Great Fire, tended to build more to the north. The 'numbered' streets as a result are all south, east/west streets north are all 'named' rather than 'numbered'. Wabash was a panel office in the very old days; all I know for sure was that Wabash cut over in one large sweep from (mostly) panel with a bit of SxS tossed in to ESS in 1973 or 74. No wholesale SxS, no crossbar, just straight to ESS. The Wabash central office is physically now (and as far back as I can remember) at 65 East Congress Parkway (corner of Wabash Avenue and Congress).

On the far north side of the city, the EDGewater central office (so named because Lake Michigan at one point lapped at its doorstep until the lake was gradually filled in a little [at first with debris from the Great Fire, then later as city planners 'moved things around a little'] and the lake got shoved a few feet east on most of the north side). EDGewater CO consists of several exchanges; the ones I am familiar with are EDGewater (773-334), UPTown (773-878), LOngbeach-1 (773-561), SUnnyside-4 (773-784), and maybe others. Although Edgewater dates back almost to the earliest of times as well, and is in the Uptown neighborhood, for whatever reason it mostly progressed over the years from panel through step by step to crossbar, and when it was 'cut' fairly early on (memory tells me it was 1976-77) one exchange there stood out like a sore thumb. City of Chicago was in the process of getting 911 service going everywhere in the city, except they ran into some hassles with LOngbeach-1. Everyone got 911 service except the subscribers with Longbeach numbers (by then it was 312-561). Phone book said '561 subscribers must continue to dial POlice-5-1313 and FIre-7-1313.' And that went on for a few months until telco was able to successfully bring around Longbeach-1. And we were getting 'zero-plus' dialing about the same time; Longbeach was left out of that for a few months also; _they_ had to dial '0' operator and ask for the long distance numbers they wanted. Longbeach also had _no_ payhones in it; and the 9xxx series of numbers were given to 'regular subscribers' where normally numbers of that type (9xxx) _on other exchanges_ were often as not given over to payphones.

A bit of non-telecom history for a few minutes here; the Uptown neighborhood in Chicago _used to be_ -- like most of Chicago -- a very elegant, very rich white neighborhood. If you had an UPTown or EDGwater phone number, you lived somewhere between Ashland Avenue on the west, Lake Michigan on the east, Montrose Avenue on the south and Foster Avenue on the north. (I think those are still the boundaries). This is a neighborhood which, in the 1920-30's had the very elegant Uptown Theatre (3000 plus seats) at Lawrence and Broadway, the Riviera Theatre a few doors south, the Aragon Ballroom, the Edgewater Beach Hotel (_directly_ on the lakefront with its elegant mile-long boardwalk) Edgewater Hospital, Radio station WEBH (as in *E*dgewater *B*each *H*otel) and of course, Uptown Station, the very elegant train stop which served the Chicago, North Shore and Milwaukee Electric Railroad, one of Samuel Insull's properties which was located at Wilson Street and Broadway, in the heart of beautiful Uptown, a shopping district only second in glamor to 63rd Street and Ashland. Its all gone today. Between the first and second wars, a nice neighborhood for Jewish people; the Uptown neighborhood began going sour when the Jews moved out (going more north toward Evanston/Skokie) and poorer white people (known in street parlance as 'white trash' or 'hillbillies' [by and large people from Appalachia] moved in. The hillbillies stayed around through the

1980's -- even a few still today -- but mostly they all ran off in dread and terror when the blacks started moving in around 1980 or so. Now today predominently black (although I remember the hillbilly population of Uptown quite well and in the early days of the hillbilly people, also the gay population which lived there.) Uptown Station is still there, but mostly subdivided into small store fronts with one tiny entrance going direct to the train tracks where CTA has rechristened the whole thing 'Wilson Avenue CTA station', and since the CTA is a notorius slumlord -- they do _not_ maintain their property in any way, shape or form -- only when ordered to do so and fined by building inspectors - the Uptown Station -- what remains of it as a train depot -- is a total dump, and very filthy. Uptown is now a 'dumping ground' by social service agencies looking to house hoardes of mentally ill people, ex-felons, drug addicts, etc. Quite a change from the Uptown I remember even in the 1960's. Very sad. PAT]