Backstory: In area codes, 212 is the only-est number
The ostentatious prefix for 'the city of bosses' is a pricey must-have – and not just in New York.
By Moises Velasquez-Manoff | Correspondent of The Christian Science Monitorfrom the March 28, 2007 edition
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Billy Zhou, a real estate agent from Queens, N.Y., would pay $1,000 for the right cellphone number. Like most things worth overpaying for, the number has to be big, shiny, and ostentatious. In other words, it has to begin with 212, the area code for that sliver of land just across the East River – Manhattan.
"It's just something rare that no one else is going to get," says Mr. Zhou. "People are always surprised that you have a 212 number."
The market dictates that when there's demand, someone will soon supply. Enter Sal Pugliese, a second-year MBA student at the State University of New York, Albany.
Mr. Pugliese has devised a way to procure, by the dozen, cellphone numbers with the coveted prefix. He sells them on eBay and Craigslist to the tune of $250 each, earning about $1,000 monthly. His clients come from far and wide, including dejected New Yorkers stuck with the less recognizable 718, 347, or 646 area codes, and people from upstate and New Jersey. He even has customers in Florida and Georgia.
"It's crazy how these people eat this stuff up," he says. "Everybody thinks it's so cool."
The geographic diversity of Pugliese's clientele only seems to validate what New Yorkers have always said: Civilization has a center, and they live in it. But instead of bodily moving to the concrete jungle – an old-fashioned notion in a cyberenabled world – this new generation of aspiring New Yorkers simply obtains the city's area code. With three simple digits, they tap into the glamour of "Sex and the City," Wall Street, Broadway, and P Diddy. They've made it.
"If you had to assign a number to the center of the universe in the American mind, that number might as well be 212," says Robert Thompson, a professor of media at Syracuse University in New York. "It's probably one of the most intensely imagined square miles in the nation, and to a degree, in the world."
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