I started a full-time job in Lower Manhattan in January. After 20 years of playing piano, taking pictures, and slinging web pages for fun and profit this is my first real desk job since I got whacked from Time-Warner in 2002. Save for one major drawback I love this new job.

Lower Manhattan used to be awash with payphones but now they are almost all gone. For the first 5 or 6 weeks on the job I thought the only remaining payphone within walking distance of the building where I worked was the non-working CityBridge phone on Nassau Street.

I was wrong. Behold the masterpiece at 77 Water Street.

I knew of the 77 Water payphone carousel from years ago. Something about my perception of space and time had me thinking it was much farther from my place of work than it is. It is practically right across the street, providing an occasional early morning or mid-day respite for me. These phones are dead to most but to me it feels like they breathe.

This structure of stubborn obsolescence is right at home, itself a work of art, positioned between two other public art pieces outside 77 Water Street. Its battered handsets move with the winds. Its nooks and crannies (I prefer to call them crooks and nannies) serve to securely affix my Payphone Radio cards until a curious passer-by scoops one of them up, or the janitor seen in this video does his job and disposes of them.

What has become of PRAY on these phones? I swear that with my own two eyes I saw, within the last few years, a single instance of the signature scratchiti on one of these phones. It was even on one of the coin boxes, said to have been the choice surface of New York City’s payphones where the legendary PRAY did her work. My sightings of PRAY had mostly been on other parts of the payphones and their enclosures.

If that etching is or was really there I cannot find it now. Like so many things in life PRAY can be like that: Right in front of your face but visible only to those with eyes to see. Mine eyes used to see but no longer do, unless she somehow got erased.

Finding photos I captured of PRAY on these phones at 77 Water feels like diving into an ocean from the bottom, feeling its weight before having a chance to simply swim. I’ve taken so many photos of payphones  (and other things, of course) that finding something like that makes the needle-in-the-haystack analogy sound quaint. This is like finding an atom in the solar system.

Here is one other of several videos I made recently from 77 Water. Find more at my YouTube Channel, reachable via flaneur.nyc.

I don’t like posting here anymore. I still scout out payphones and share findings on social media. But when it comes to this website I’ve had no heart in it for a long time. How can one burn out on something they still love?

But after an influential-seeming advertising entity described this content as “low quality” I all but gave up. It’s true, I don’t play click-bait games, I don’t chase keywords, I don’t trick anyone into being here. By modern standards that makes me “low quality.” I’d be OK with that if it didn’t deny me an income. I used to make my entire living off this and a few other websites. Those days are gone.

The full-time job referenced earlier in this piece has also played its part in making this once-loved project of mine feel like an albatross. I like the job, maybe a little too much. Certain aspects of the job remain irresistible to me, but I am losing money at it with its barely-livable wages and time-commitment.

And WordPress! Even the mighty WordPress with its bloated slowness and idiosyncratic irritants — the content management system itself makes my head feel heavy and my heart unenthusiastic.

If the content is worth nothing the domain names might be. Right?

If anyone wants to buy the payphone-project.com and payphoneproject.com domain names I’m happy to discuss.