As one Twitter user famously remarked, “In the age of cell phones, the area code has become the ancestral clan name or heraldry.”
In Los Angeles, those three little numbers are a mark of neighborhood identity. As Evan Lovett tells us on “L.A. In a Minute,” the L.A. metro area has 11 different area codes – the most of any U.S. city.
Back in 1947, when telephone companies developed the original North American Numbering Plan, the entirety of Southern California was assigned the area code 213.
But a decade later, phone companies were running out of numbers. They began splitting off geographic regions under new area codes, and in 1984, L.A. added the code 818.
The 1990s saw a spike in demand for new phone numbers thanks to fax machines, pagers, and mobile phones. Thus came a flurry of new L.A. area codes: 310, 909, 562, 626, 393, 949, 661, 424, and 747.
And there’s a twelfth area code on the way: 738 is expected to begin implementation in November 2024.
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