There aren’t any special zip codes. The US Postal Service is too mundane for that.

NY 10022

Trump Tower, at Barack Obama Avenue, New York, NY 10022

@zenvelo I consider Beverly Hills 90210 to be a special zip code.
@rebbel You had me for a second, until it processed in my brain. LOL.

Who’s zip code is 00100 or 00000? Or other round or mathematically interesting numbers?

90210 was the zip code for Beverly Hills since ZIP Codes were introduced.

00010 and 00000 are not valid zip codes.

10000 and 10001 are New York City, but not assigned to a street address.

ZIP Code Trivia:

When ZIP codes started, there was contention between cities near Concord Mass as to which Post Office would be assigned 01776. It was given to Sudbury MA.

60606 is in Chicago.

The Internal Revenue Service used to (don’t sure if they still do) had a mailing address for US Income tax returns. Probably back in the 1970s or 1980s.

Anyway the zip code was something like 01257 or similar which would have made it be some place in Massachusetts. But in actuality, the IRS sent all of those to a processing site in New Jersey (which has a totally different zip code structure – starting with 018 or 019 or something)

So it was a zip code that was deliberately inaccurate, and it belonged to the government.

I wish I could find the article..

In the US, there are APO (army post offices), FPO (field post offices), and DPO (Diplomatic Post Offices, that have Zip codes that deliberately hide the location of the recepient.

For example, you might address a letter to APO 96522, but there’s no way to know whether that is Thailand or India or Korea or wherever.

Zip code 90210.

Area code (you didn’t ask this, but I thought you might be interested) 212 in NYC.

Santa’s zip code, in Canada, is actually HOH OHO —same precept as HOHOHO

They weren’t just being tongue-and-cheek. Letters to Santa and North Pole normally would be sorted by hand or end up in the dead-letter office. But with that zip code, they get routed correctly right away.

Why is Chicago 60606 special?
Also 212 in NYC ?

@JLeslie
@zenvelo

Not Zip codes but 2 letter state abbreviations. Here’s a very funny “documentary” by Gary Gulman describing the exciting process: Abbreviations

Love the sky comma.

@anniereborn Anyone with any connection to NY knows 212. When my aunt died I thought about selling her phone number (people actually pay for 212 numbers, because they are hard to get) but I didn’t bother in the end. It’s not like it would sell for thousands, but there is a market for them anyway. If you are very young you grew up with multiple area codes for NYC, but back in the day there was one—212.

Carolina Herrera even named a fragrance 212 https://www.carolinaherrera.com/us/en/fragrances/212-fragrance/212-carolina-herrera-nyc/212-nyc/?gclid=EAIaIQobChMI3Z2UvcXu5AIVDGyGCh06ug4IEAAYASAAEgJzFPD_BwE She’s a well known Venezuelan-American designer. I assume she is American now.

Some Miami people talk about being in “the 305” (that’s their area code from the day) but I don’t know how well known that is.

212 is special for another reason.

Before push-button phones, we had dial phones and pulse dialing. You would turn the dial to make a call. Dialing a “2” was easier than dialing a “9” because your finger didn’t need to move so far around the dial.

picture of a dial phone

Anyway, NYC was assigned the 212 area code because it took the fewest movements (2 + 1 + 2 = 5) of any place in the US. Los Angeles was 213 (2+1+3=6) and Chicago was 312 (3_1_2=6).

Bigger cities got faster dialing. A place like Miami (305) took 8 dial strokes.

So 212 has a certain historical panache if you ever used a dial phone.

@elbanditoroso Interesting. That makes sense. Although, Westchester was 914, and it was among some of the first area codes assigned I think. Not a big city like NY, but fairly populated suburb/county. I lived there as a child, so that code goes back to at least the 60’s, probably before. My area code in MD was 301, a suburb of DC, and similar population I think. But, to your point DC is 202.

I wonder why emergency was decided to be 911. Information was 411 in many states. When I moved to Michigan they had no idea what 411 was. I guess this is moving into another topic for another Q though. I’ll have to google a little.

@JLeslie My sister’s family has lived in NYC since 1980. So I am very familiar with 212. I guess I just didn’t know the significance.
Also I grew up in a Chicago suburb and in the early days we were also 312. Again, I just didn’t realize the significance.
And yeh, I remember rotary phones.

@anniereborn I have an 8-year-old grandkid who has never seen a dial phone in her life – I showed her a picture of one, and she said “how did you call people?”

@JLeslie 411 was information on all AT&T phone exchanges nationally. 911 was adopted because it worked on both rotary dial and push-button phones.

When area codes were introduced in the early 1960s, the second digit was always 1 or 0, because then it would not be a part of a local exchange (the first three numbers of your local number). The second digit of an area code told the switching equipment that you were dialing long distance to another area.

Allan Sherman expressed it best; The Let’s All Call Up A.T & T And Protest To The President March

So, I guess Michigan didn’t have AT&T?

@elbanditoroso Well I am 51, so I know them for sure. But, I know a lot of kids don’t.

Ironically, you could still get a rotary dial phone as late as 2008, and for years there were “rotary: phones that used a “rotary pulse” feature where it electronically simulated the rotary pulse when you pushed the buttons. I hated those—the worst of both worlds.

I wish my family had saved a few of our old rotary telephones. I never saw one outside of antique malls since the year 2000 or 2001. They run about 40–50 bucks to buy a mint-condition phone from your childhood,.

I wish I had the collection of phones which were in our attic when I was a kid. We had a wooden box hand crank phone. I hurt myself on that once, because I thought a scene on TV was funny when someone was holding the bare ends of the wires in each hand when someone turned the handle. Not actually funny.
We had a black desk phone which was heavier than Its size would indicate. The receiver alone was maybe two pounds. It did not rest in a cradle, but two y shaped rests which held the receiver well above the body of the phone.
There were maybe half a dozen, but those two are what have stayed in my memory.