My quest continues to find payphones of Boston from 2014 that still work today in 2020. No such luck today.

Five payphones in a row stood near the Park Street MBTA station entrance at Boston Common in July, 2014. All appear to be gone today. Their numbers, disconnected, from left to right, were 617-338-9025, 617-338-8536, 617-338-8103, 617-338-6509, and 617-338-6507. None of these numbers appeared in the Boston Payphone Locator or anywhere else on The Payphone Project.

A vestige of the Verizon brand on one of the payphones indicates that these and other phones throughout Boston were among those taken over by PTS in 2011, when Verizon exited the payphone and calling card businesses altogether. Other companies that acquired Verizon’s payphone assets included Van Wagner, Titan, and others. The last phone on the right is a little lower to the ground in compliance with the Americans With Disabilities Act.

The “FREE CALLS” placards seen on the inner clamshell of each Boston Common payphones encouraged payphone users to dial *NN combinations to be directly connected to services like a Daily Prayer, or the Social Security Administration, among others. These *NN combinations are shortcuts to toll-free numbers that do, indeed, connect to the services listed. Calls to these toll-free numbers earn the payphone owner about 50¢ in “Dialaround Compensation”, an FCC-mandated fee paid to payphone owners as compensation for the actual financial cost incurred in connecting toll-free calls.

It costs you, the caller, nothing to make a toll-free call from a payphone. But there are costs incurred by the payphone provider and, of course, the company that owns the toll-free number.

So if you want to help out your local payphone service provider pick up one of their phones and dial some toll-free numbers, it won’t cost you a dime. The only caveat is that a lot of payphones were never programmed to recognize newer toll-free area codes, like 877, 866, 855, 844, and 833, as toll-free exchanges. In those cases the payphone will request something like 50¢ for 2 minutes, thinking you are making a regular long-distance call. It’s unfortunate that toll-free calls from payphones are not always toll-free when they should be. If you stick to 800 and 888 toll-free exchanges you should be OK.