#Compton area code 213 code#
Since the “big bang” from the original 213 spalled off so many area codes, what have those identities become? In 1994, the writer of a Times op-ed explained, perhaps tongue in cheek, what a numerologist had told him: That 213, the original hardcore heart of L.A., is the area code of the working class, “without pretensions.” How could the numerologist omit the fact that 213 is also the area code for civic Los Angeles, which is almost exclusively about political pretensions? The telephones of 310 occupy a more “highbrow, ritualized, sterile environment,” and the phone folks of 818 - reaching from valley to valley then, the San Fernando to the San Gabriel - are “old-fashioned stand-up values” incarnate. In 1991, a year before a new 310 area code snatched more than two million telephones from the bosom of 213, a sociologist named James Katz, who studied the social effect of telephone technology said that Californians were pricklier about their area-code identities than people elsewhere, that these three digits were like compass points on our mental map, and thus, “when you take away the number, in a certain sense you’re erasing the identity.”
And what we have, to the frequent mystification of newcomers, is a nest of area codes.
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