I think I have developed an instinct where, upon entering a place of business, I can just tell when it will contain an abandoned payphone, or at least vestiges of a phone removed long ago. This instinct had never been more pronounced than a couple of weeks ago, when I entered a C-Town Supermarket in Jackson Heights, at 37th Avenue and 86th Street. Something about the faint mustiness and the general character of the place made me think it had not been renovated in a generation.

Sure enough, as I rounded toward the exit of the store I spotted this old beauty, with no dial tone and no clear evidence of who to blame for leaving it behind. The Phone1 logo on the yellow handset suggests this was at one time a Verizon phone, but the informational placard is that of a COCOT, and the small sticker on the top right of the placard above the handset looks like it said “COIN-something COMMUNICATIONS”.

A scraped-away sticker on top of the bottom placard looks like it contained the name and address of the company that owned this phone. Whoever left this phone to rot made some effort to avoid being held responsible for it. It looks like the company would have had an address on Washington Avenue in Carlstadt, NJ.

The sticker top right on this panel looks like it says COIN-something COMMUNICATIONS. COIN TOSS, maybe? That would be an atypically clever name for a payphone company. Toss those coins here…

My instincts on guessing where these abandoned bits of telephonic detritus might lurk gravitate, not surprisingly, toward older structures that appear to have not seen renovation in a long time. I bet most of the workers at this C-Town have become blind to this old phone. Until, that is, someone like me picks up the handset and they kindly inform me that the phone is out of order.