This frozen-in-time faded ad—complete with 1980s-style graffiti—remains on the side of a warehouse along 31st Street in Astoria.
The RA comes from Ravenswood, an enchantingly named hamlet that once existed along the East River and was home to many old-money mansions in the 19th century.
The neighborhood was absorbed into Long Island City toward the end of the 1800s, but the name lives on in the form of the nearby Ravenswood Houses and the Ravenswood Generation Station.
This Millionaire Realty sign, on Astoria Boulevard, doesn’t look very old. But it must date back to the 1960s at least, when telephone numbers still had the two-letter prefix.
Tags: Astoria 31st Street, Astoria history, faded ads in Queens NYC, Long Island City, old phone exchanges New York City, old phone exchanges Queens, Queens, Queens history, Ravenswood
Ephemeral New York 
September 23, 2010 at 11:37 am |
Is there a database of what the two letter combinations in the telephone exchanges were short for? I grew up in East Flatbush and our exchange was NA9. I have never found an satisfactory explanation for what that particular exchange was abbreviated from.
September 23, 2010 at 1:50 pm |
I wish I could find a site that decoded some of the abbreviations too. This one is pretty helpful in revealing what exchange matched a specific neighborhood:
http://phone.net46.net/nyc/latealphnumer.html
September 27, 2010 at 2:16 am |
Thanks wildnewyork. They have 628, but not 629…my search continues…
June 2, 2016 at 6:36 am |
[…] to, tentatively. In 1881, a caisson was sunk into the river on the Queens side, off the outpost of Ravenswood, according to the Greater Astoria Historical Society’s The Queensboro […]
July 10, 2017 at 6:04 am |
[…] for something in the neighborhood, if not the neighborhood itself, such as MU for Murray Hill; RA for Ravenswood, once a separate Village in Queens but now absorbed by […]