Newcomers to New York City are often burdened with area codes that advertise their rookie status like a scarlet letter. But few go to the drastic lengths of Dennis Mykytyn, who wanted a 212 area code so badly he paid $3,000 for 100 of them.
“It’s prestigious,” said Mr. Mykytyn, who runs a record label, Modern Records, in an office at Lafayette and East Fourth Streets. “When 212 is on your phone, everyone knows where that it is, and it means you’ve been around for a while.”
Mr. Mykytyn bought the 212 numbers in bulk in 2007 when he was moving his hedge fund from Westchester to 30 Rockefeller Plaza. He’s since closed the fund and now uses less than 10 of the numbers.
But he has no intention of selling the dormant digits.
“I viewed it as a marketing expense,” he said of the purchase.
A bounty of 212 numbers in sequence is so hard to find that the telecom company that sold Mr. Mykytyn the numbers, Improcom, now sells them in bundles of five or 10, rather than by the hundreds as they did four years ago.
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