21 Jun 2010

Lost Capitol Hill: The LIncoln Exchange

PEnnsylvania 6-5000. ENterprise 4-3200. KLondike 5-1212. LIncoln 7-2321. You may remember some of these from a time long ago: This was how phone numbers were communicated in the days before the telephone company thought you could remember 7 – or even 10 – numbers. The last is of interest here, because it was the exchange for Capitol Hill and environs, and today I will take a look at the company responsible for telephone service on the Hill as well as the building in which the LIncoln numbers were handled.

The Chesapeake and Potomac Telephone Company (hereinafter C&P Telephone) was founded in DC in 1883. It serviced Washington DC, and later expanded into Maryland, Virginia, and even as far as West Virginia. The use of telephones expanded rapidly in DC, as might be imagined, and in 1906, C&P Telephone announced they were building a new exchange to handle demand. It was built at 629 B Street NE (before it became Constitution Avenue) and was designed by the NYC architecture firm of Eidlitz and McKenzie, who had become famous two years earlier for designing One Times Square in their home city. The builder was John McGregor, who built numerous embassies around DC, as well as a number of other high-profile projects.

The new exchange also allowed the federal government to expand their own in-house telephone system, as they took over the old C&P exchange near the Capitol. This meant that they were in charge of their own lines and only needed to request service from C&P Telephone for outside calls.

From the start, the building was known as the Lincoln exchange, and thereafter, telephone numbers were listed as “Lincoln 2195” in the telephone directories (that particular number belonged to William Murphy, a builder living on Lincoln Park) All calls to and from the Lincoln exchange area were routed through this building, and telephone operators would be standing by to connect the callers with the correct subscriber. (The picture here is of a room of operators working for C&P Telephone in 1919, though not at the 629 B Street location)

C&P Switchboard operators. (from Shorpys.com)

Telephones continued to explode in popularity, and telephone company engineers kept searching for new ways to make telephoning easier. The biggest change came in the ability to automatically dial phone numbers, and beginning in the 1930s, C&P Telephone began switching over to the new technology. As they did so, they also introduced the new form of telephone numbers, where the first two numbers were replaced with two letters corresponding to letters on the telephone dial. Thus did Lincoln 2195 become LIncoln 5-2195 (or something like that)

At this time, all those with the 54 (LI) prefix were farmed out of the building at 629 Constitution, and those who still worked through the manual exchange were given LUdlow 3 numbers. In 1949, then, it was time for the old way to entirely give way to the new. The LUdlow exchange, the last manual exchange in the city, was closed on December 17th, and the 66 operators still patching calls were assigned to new duties.

Today, the C&P Building is a condominium, and one of its units is written up in Thomas Grooms’s book, The Majesty of Capitol Hill.

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2 responses to “Lost Capitol Hill: The LIncoln Exchange”

  1. Hill Lover says:

    The units in this building are so cool

  2. ET says:

    Wish I could remember when/where I read this but I ran across and old WaPo (I think) article on how the telephone company came up with the exchange names. It was quite interesting.

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