Another day, another front page New York Times mention for me. Hah. It’s been a weird couple of weeks around here. This is from yesterday and looks to be online-only, not in print. Watch the video, or read more below:
I get a paragraph in a short piece, The Phone Booth of the Mind, about the monotask culture of the telephone, in which Melissa Kirsch notes:
Pay phones were stationary monotaskers. Before cellphones, if you wanted to talk to someone, you did it at home, at work or in a booth. Your telecommunications were contained to these discrete spaces, separate from the rest of your life. Pay phones may be nearly obsolete, but there’s nothing stopping us from reinstituting some of their boundaries in a post-pay-phone world.
“Monotaskers.” True enough. Phone calls from payphones are not interrupted by text messages from your girlfriend or alerts from a news app you never configured to just shut up already. I recently procured a new cell phone and cannot seem to stop the jackpot of alerts coming from VR browsers I never installed or games I haven’t played in 3 years.
In other payphone-era-ending news I learned yesterday that the Doomsday Payphone, as it came to be called on my YouTube channel featuring payphones of New York City and New Jersey, is up for sale. At only $200 asking price it might not last long, although cost of removal would exceed the sale price.
https://www.facebook.com/marketplace/item/1412428625888060/
The phone still works. I believe it to be the last working payphone owned by an independent payphone service provider in New York City. The “independents”, as they came to be known, were responsible for carpet-bombing New York City sidewalks with thousands upon thousands of phone during the mid- to late-1990s.
Their number rapidly diminished around 2014-2016. The independents were mostly forced out of the business by the City granting CityBridge its monopoly monopoly on all sidewalk PCS (Public Communication Structures). That include both payphones and the LinkNYC totems that replaced them.
The Doomsday phone survives because it is not on City property. Found on a strip mall on 21st Street at 33rd Road in Astoria this phone was not subject to the wholesale removal of all non-CityBridge payphone on City sidewalks.
At one point the “independents” of New York numbered in the hundreds. These companies, with forgotten names like American Payphone, Davel Communications, Underdog Communications, MetTel, and so on; formed a once-lively “Independent Payphone Association of New York.” The IPANY membership made regular appearances at annual payphone industry trade shows, hosted by the American Public Communications Council. These conferences typically took place in Las Vegas.
Today there is just one independent payphone service provider in New York City. Or is there? By the time I type these words this phone, owned by East Harlem Unity Telecommunication (EHUC), may have sold, its company essentially evaporated.
I don’t know the future of the Doomsday phone but it worked yesterday, and sounded great. I would hope someone takes it on and keeps it alive, but we can’t expect miracles.