Hold the Phone! Pittsburgh Suburb Is Cut Off

It happened, suddenly, in mid-1998.

At the Penguin Bookshop on Beaver Street, customer calls mysteriously dwindled. Travelers at Pittsburgh International Airport trying to phone friends in Sewickley couldn’t find their numbers. Over at the borough hall, the secretary began fielding directory-assistance inquiries.

A new Pittsburgh telephone directory was circulating. And what perplexed folks in this affluent riverside suburb was a very simple problem: They weren’t in it.

Bell Atlantic, now Verizon Communications, had reorganized its phone books and made Sewickley and surrounding communities--the 741 and 749 exchanges of western Pennsylvania’s 412 area code, representing about 13,000 people--a separate entity deemed worthy of its very own, albeit slim, volume.

“They just cut us off,” said Jim Price, owner of Cuttings, a flower shop in Sewickley’s business district, and the outgoing Chamber of Commerce president.

Today, 2 1/2 years after Sewickley asked the state Public Utility Commission to reverse Verizon’s decision, things are not copacetic. Perplexity has turned to outrage, and the issue is in court. The borough has spent nearly $100,000 in legal fees, with help from other affected communities.

Verizon says it is merely trying to standardize and update its directories in the best way.

Reg Henry, a Pittsburgh Post-Gazette columnist and Sewickley resident, calls the directory reshuffling “a flaming dirigible of an idea.” It is, he wrote, “disquieting to wake up one day and find that the phone company has taken upon itself to declare that your community is no longer part of the Pittsburgh area.

“True, we had always thought this secretly. But if we had wanted to secede, we would have done it ourselves, with an appropriate show of haughtiness,” Henry groused. “Don’t they understand that this represents change and that we don’t like change in the Pittsburgh area?”

He was kidding--partly. But he’s right: It’s about more than just the phone book.

Behind the fight lie some subtle but troubling questions: What happens when one slice of a community is suddenly removed? In an age of Metropolitan Statistical Areas, how do people respond to being cut off, even on such a seemingly mundane level?

After more than a century of realignment and population growth, American cities and their satellite communities have developed intricate, always changing, relationships. Everything imaginable binds metropolitan areas together and makes their communities interdependent as never before--from railroad lines, rivers, roads and newspapers to the less tangible television signals, business ties and, yes, telephone books.

Such ties are crucial for Sewickley. It sits perched along the Ohio River 10 miles west of its starting point, the junction of the Allegheny and Monongahela rivers--the “Golden Triangle” that is the heart of downtown Pittsburgh.

“That whole area is the fastest-growing area of Allegheny County. They are disenfranchising that community,” said Democratic state Sen. Jack Wagner, a former Pittsburgh City Council president. He has testified on Sewickley’s behalf at public hearings on the issue.

Pittsburgh has always had an insularity about it, primarily because of the hilly, nook-and-cranny geography that has isolated communities, preserved ethnic enclaves and made the metropolitan region more a collection of neighborhoods than you see in flatter cities, where sections often melt together.

For more than a century, Sewickley (pronounced “S’wickley” by many locals) has been the gladed, predominantly white home to prominent Pittsburghers--executives of Mellon Bank, H. J. Heinz, Jones & Laughlin Steel and, most recently, Pittsburgh Penguins co-owner and sometime player Mario Lemieux.

Today, it retains that high-end flavor--gazebos at the main intersection, amiable cops walking the beat in threes.

“Sewickley has always been a bedroom community to Pittsburgh,” said Kevin Flannery, the borough’s manager. “Yes, there are mountains, there are hills, there are bridges. There’s always been this geography issue in Pittsburgh. But everybody is now working together in this county. Yet in a phone book, Sewickley can’t be connected?”

Stephanie Hobbs, a Verizon Information Services spokeswoman, says an intricate process called scoping determines which communities are listed where. It takes into account everything from shopping patterns to customer focus groups to the very thickness of the phone book.

“We don’t come in in the morning and say, ‘Let’s take Sewickley out of the Pittsburgh book,’ ” Hobbs said.

She says the merger of Bell Atlantic and GTE into Verizon last year made matters more complicated. And, though she can’t discuss the pending court case, she says that means potential reevaluations everywhere, including in Pittsburgh, where all communities that touch the city are in the phone book (Sewickley doesn’t).

“People feel ownership of their phone book. It’s their community,” Hobbs said. “They are a very affluent community and maintain, possibly correctly so, that their shopping is in Pittsburgh and that Pittsburgh people come to them. . . . But we think we have a good case here. This is a clean, this-is-where-we-did-it-everywhere-else kind of thing.”

Hobbs understands Sewickley’s dismay. She remembers a phone book problem in Baltimore when, years ago, Bell put penguins on the directory’s cover. Trouble is, there are no penguins in Baltimore.

“The outrage in the community was amazing,” she recalled.

The difference between the phone books is rather dramatic. The 2000-2001 Verizon Sewickley-Coraopolis directory is a combined 161 white pages and 218 yellow pages. The Greater Pittsburgh book has 1,270 white pages of personal listings and 314 business pages; a separate volume of yellow pages runs 1,097 pages.

Sewickley’s merchants and professionals, who rely on business from across the area, worry about the impact. They say potential customers will look in the white and yellow pages, see nothing and assume that stores have gone out of business. That, they say, could damage Sewickley’s economy.

“Everybody should watch out. This could happen anywhere,” said Robin Hays, co-owner of Party Ants, a store that delivers balloons across the metro area. She, like some other merchants, pays $2.05 a month to maintain a listing in the Greater Pittsburgh book; people can keep their home phone numbers in for $1.25 a month.

Hays is bewildered by the whole thing.

“When you go out of town and people say where are you from, you say Pittsburgh. You don’t say Sewickley,” she said.

But a glimpse into history reveals a century-old irony in Sewickley, which was settled by Indians before white people began to trickle in during the late 1700s.

Until 1851, aside from the occasional stagecoach, irregularly scheduled riverboats were the only way to get to Pittsburgh from Sewickley. Then the train came through, connecting Sewickley to Allegheny, the city that is now Pittsburgh’s North Side. Thus did Sewickley become an accessible suburb for Pittsburgh’s well-to-do.

By 1893, a history of Sewickley by Agnes L. Ellis was praising the transportation system: “The accommodations for travel are better here than even the suburban towns of Chicago, making it as convenient for businessmen to live here as anywhere on the outskirts of Pittsburg,”as it was then spelled.

But according to Edward K. Muller, a University of Pittsburgh historical geographer, too much access didn’t sit well. In the 1890s, the electrification of trolley cars expanded their range and reduced the cost of transportation. Sewickley refused to allow the streetcars in.

“They felt that would bring a lower level of development and a greater amount of development,” Muller said.

Today, in the midst of the Information Age, electronic connections like the telephone can be as important as physical ones. “Now,” Muller said, “100 years later, they’re being thrown out of the metropolitan area. And they’re fighting it.”

Verizon says Sewickley residents can get Pittsburgh books for free, and anybody in the area who wants a Sewickley-Coraopolis directory is welcome to one. But, residents point out, would-be customers on the other side of the region probably won’t look to a Sewickley directory when shopping for flowers or balloons or financial consultants.

For now, the community remains angry and awaits a Jan. 23 hearing before the administrative judge. Verizon says its Internet directory, Superpages.com, can offset the problem by allowing areawide searches, although not everybody has access to the World Wide Web.

Near the corner of Broad and Beaver streets, Sewickley’s main intersection, stand two pay phones. On them is the slogan: “Verizon--the Payphone of Choice.” These days, that’s probably wishful thinking.

“We just want to be back in the book. We’re so close to Pittsburgh. It just makes no sense,” said Flannery, the borough manager. “They tell me there’s 7,000 phone numbers. . . . That’s what this whole issue is about.”