This payphone got a lot of use, but the advertising enclosure got a lot of abuse. The duct tape looks like it might be the only thing holding this structure up. The ad panels did not usually stay in place for long, typically ending up on the sidewalk or on 34th Avenue after someone ripped them out.
Somehow this payphone survives. It has dial tone. You can call people through this device. It is awesome.
It’s become a chore, I’m sorry to say, to post content to this website. I don’t like WordPress anymore but it I feel stuck with it. I post more frequently to wsbj.com/sorabji, I believe on account of having set up the post-by-email gateway. It seems so much easier and enjoyable to post outside the WordPress…
Short video of a pristine old New England Telephone booth hiding away in Chinatown.
In which I spotted a rare ETS payphone in the wilds of New Jersey. I am making my documentary payphone videos available on archive.org from now on. Archive.org = Less likes, more love.
![[VIDEO] Dial Tone in The Bronx, and Other Co-Op City Payphone Finds](https://i0.wp.com/www.payphone-project.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/20220713_124203-scaled.jpg?resize=250%2C180&ssl=1)
I am told I missed a few, but Co-Op City turned up a number of intact and not-so-intact payphone remains. This further highlights what a lie it was when New York City, with even the New York Times repeating the claim, declared that the “Last Payphone of New York City” had been plucked from the…
![[VIDEO] My Payphone-Finding Investigative Skills Thrive Unabated](https://i0.wp.com/www.payphone-project.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/20220710_092908-scaled.jpg?resize=250%2C180&ssl=1)
I don't know why the clamshell has slunk so low to the ground, or if it was always like that for ADA compliance? Given its location that makes not a lot of sense but anything is possible.
![[VIDEO] Two Payphone Tours on Pride Sunday: West End Ave. & Times Square/Port Authority](https://i0.wp.com/www.payphone-project.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/pride-sundey-payphone-tour.png?resize=250%2C180&ssl=1)
Looks like someone at the MTA got their knickers in a twist over the everlasting payphone carcasses that litter New York’s subway stations. Gone as of recently are the last two phones from 6th Avenue/Bryant Park, one of which had dial tone until a few weeks before its disappearance. Also goinggoinggone are, as seen in…
![[VIDEO] Checking in From Rockefeller Center’s Last Working Payphone](https://i0.wp.com/www.payphone-project.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/20210330_130406-scaled1.jpg?resize=250%2C180&ssl=1)
This phone is all that is left of Rockefeller Center's once-formidable "COMMUNICATIONS" portal. This is from last week, after the mentally and intellectually orgasmic conversation with a new PCP who, I did not know, also doubles as a psychotherapist. That was the emotionally clog-draining psychotherapy session I never thought I'd get.
Last month's announcement that the "last payphone" of New York City had been hauled off to slaughter was very specific in its definition of "last payphone." So specific, in fact, that it not only failed to acknowledge a variety of still-working publicly-accessible phones but also the rotted remains of CityBridge-owned phones like this one.
I left Jayson Blaire's effluvia out of this litany.
![[VIDEO] Checking in from Yet Another “Last Payphone of New York City”](https://i0.wp.com/www.payphone-project.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/vlcsnap-2022-06-22-18h10m53s635.png?resize=250%2C180&ssl=1)
I have more triggers than I thought. Others to come?
Thanks to Diggy64 in the comments section of 2020’s article “PRAYphones Gone From Midtown Manhattan” we now know that work of the immortal scratchiti artist PRAY made an appearance in 1984’s Brother From Another Planet and other films as well. Here is PRAY’s appearance from that film, at about 44:38. Look for more discussion of…
![[VIDEO] The Romance of Knowing Your Shit in an Avalanche of Fools](https://i0.wp.com/www.payphone-project.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/Payphone-Radio-Card-20190306_120138-003-with-number-not-bad-002.jpg?resize=250%2C180&ssl=1)
I have resumed making Payphone Radio calls from still-working New York City payphones. In this episode I explore the unthinkable possibility that I have character flaws.
These phones at the Met Museum in New York may not be antiquities by Museum standards, or compared to other items housed at that august institution. But like most of the artists on display at this museum the phones, numbered, 212-650-1305 and 212-650-0682, have been dead for a long time.
A true end of an era in New York City payphones seems to be upon us. The last of the "Independents" appears to be finally on its way to history. That is, unless a concerned buyer can buy it with the purpose of keeping at least one more working publicly-accessible alive. We can hope for miracles, right?
Action shot from today. Reliable sources tell me this phone does about $1.50 in business a day. But it shouldn't be about business, or profits, should it? Phones like this should be subsidized in the public interest. People would still use public pay telephones, if only they could.
The bronze statue, by Milton Hebal, still stands outside the Delacorte Theater. The payphones didn't make it.
I brought out my boss field recorder to get all the audio of what happens when one tries to make phone calls through CityBridge’s West End Avenue phone booths. I’ve done this before but only with partial audio recorded through my camera’s mic. This time I brought a field recorder and a Radio Shack suction-cup thingy used to record phone calls.
This beauty lurks at 7th Avenue at 33rd street, downstairs in the Penn Station 1/2/3 station, outside the Sbarro. No identifying information remains with respect to which of New York’s once-abundant independent payphone service providers left this one behind. What a phone like this needs, of course, is a couple of Payphone Radio cards to…
If you encounter the West End Avenue phones yourself do not be fooled by the dial tone. Attempts to make calls send you to an automated service that appears to let you complete your call using a calling card, credit card, or by calling collect.
I finally got at the payphones in Carnegie Hall for the first time since pandemic. Carnegie has a vax card requirement for entry. This made me think they’d only allow people in if they had tickets for a concert or other legitimate business there. Maybe that was true before but I got through today with…
CityBridge, the same consortium responsible for LinkNYC and Link5G, let this filthy payphone totem, reeking of piss/shit/I don’t want to know what else, molder in plain site for years at 42nd Street and 5th Avenue. These Smart City’s filthgasms finally disappeared last month, presumably to make way for a Smart City LinkNYC 5G skyscraper or…
![The New Link5G LinkNYC Skyscrapers Close-Up [Video]](https://i0.wp.com/www.payphone-project.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/DSC09621-scaled.jpg?resize=250%2C180&ssl=1)
The Intersection/Google/CityBridge Smart City monopoly continues to fail up. The future of public communications, the next evolution of the payphone, looks like this. Meet Link5G. Some shoddy workmanship and general ugliness. If the LinkNYC rollout was any indication we can look forward to 7 or 8 of these 5G absolute necessities on every intersection in…
Thanks solely to the Simon & Garfunkel song "America" I long maintained a romanticized notion of the New Jersey Turnpike, and the very word "turnpike" itself. Long, dark corridors of travel and imagination, falling in love with strangers, making millions off royalties from songs written about those strangers.
I would swear I found PRAY on one of these payphones some years ago. Finding any photos I captured of it seems impossible now. Also, this domain name might be for sale. The content, I'm told, is worth nothing. Maybe the domain name is?
Redittors have not been the only people talking about Payphone Radio. Peter Skiera christened his new blog with a lengthy writeup of that radio stream. It is a good piece of writing. I was happy to have plenty of room to represent myself as not quite the incoherent faux-suicidal Joe Frank-wannabe weirdo some Payphone Radio…
I found myself watching a church sermon today, live streamed on Facebook from the Faith Church on Fear Street in Eau Claire, Wisconsin. I am not religious, despite having attended Catholic schools from the 3rd grade all the way through high school. I attend a church once in a while. My only interest is the…