North and Central Orange County (CA) Central Office Service Areas

How the data was obtained

In the summer of 1987 I spent a lot of time in the library. I had with me a Thomas Brothers mapbook of Orange County, some colored pencils, and some idea of where telephone wire center service boundaries were based on phone numbers that I knew to exist at various locations around the county. The library had a Haines Criss Cross Directory, which listed names and either addresses by telephone number, or telephone numbers by address. These directories were available for use while in the library, but they could not be taken out, so I spent many full days and evenings there with my map and my pencils estimating where I thought the boundaries were and then looking up phone numbers by address block and narrowing down the exact boundaries.

I have a lot of lines drawn on my 1984 Thomas Brothers mapbook. The big feat is getting that data onto this web site. I cannot just scan the maps because it is both illegal and impractical. The boundaries often cover several map pages that would have to be somehow pasted together both horizontally and vertically. Instead I have decided to draw the boundaries and other reference points such as streets, rivers, etc. Since I cannot draw well on paper, much less with a mouse, each map takes me a very long time, so in time as I finish each, I will post it on this site.

The reason these maps are at all interesting is that wire center service areas do not always follow the city limits of the place for which they are named. For instance, the Anaheim wire center protrudes into Fullerton and Placentia, yet it does not serve Anaheim Hills (that is served by the Orange wire center); there is no Fountain Valley wire center (it is served by the Huntington Beach and Santa Ana wire centers). The maps are not drawn to scale, and I do not guarantee accuracy of this data. It is as accurate as I could get with the materials I was using and is for reference only. While the research was done in 1987, wire center service areas hardly ever change, so the data is not likely to have been obsoleted since then. I do know of one instance where the boundaries were changed, and in that case the map will show both the 1987 boundary and the boundary that I know to exist today.

In 1999 I found that the central office building locations became available on Mapquest. This served to verify my suspicions about some of those windowless brick phone company buildings, and I have started adding these building locations to the boundary maps.

The maps

Moo!
  • Anaheim
  • Fullerton
  • Brea
  • Placentia
  • Yorba Linda
  • Buena Park
  • Cypress
  • Orange
  • Garden Grove
  • Westminster
  • Santa Ana
  • Huntington Beach
  • Newport Beach
  • Irvine

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