The white-brick residence at 155 East 38th Street doesn’t appear to be any different than the hundreds of others like it in Manhattan.
Except for one thing: the north side of the building sports a super old-school ad for apartment vacancies—air-conditioned, from 1 to 4.5 rooms!
The old OR exchange stood for ORchard, indicating a Lower East Side realty office ORegon.
Tags: 155 East 38th Street NYC, 2-letter phone exchanges NYC, building ads New York, faded ads New York City, Murray Hill apartments, old apartment ads NYC, OR phone exchange, vintage ads NYC
May 19, 2014 at 10:27 am |
You’re wrong about the telephone exchange. There never was an ORchard 9 exchange. ORchard 4 was pretty much the only ORchard exchange (I remember that one, it was my own home exchange in the period when I lived on Henry Street in the Lower East Side, about 1950), though for a short period of time there was an ORchard 7 exchange (only in the late 30s, from about 1936 to about 1939).
The OR 9 exchange in the ad was ORegon. The ORegon exchanges were established in the late 1940s, so the ad could be from no earlier than 1948.
May 19, 2014 at 4:11 pm |
Noted! Thanks for the fix.