This picture from August, 2000, shows a Bell Atlantic payphone in Long Island City, outside the 2000 Management Inc. garage.

The space formerly occupied by 2000 Management Inc. is now home to Queens Auto Center.

Ten years later the Bell Atlantic payphone which formerly hung on the wall outside the garage is gone. Evidence of this payphone’s existence survives in the form of a gray rectangular shape on the wall, and a wryly grinning wire rising from the former payphone location and up the wall.

These pictures, taken at about the same spot as the one above, are from May 23, 2010:

This area around 37th Avenue between Crescent and 21st Streets literally used to have payphones on every corner and, like the one formerly outside this garage, in the middle of the block. Nowadays I don’t think you can find a single public phone around here, though the hulks and shadows of removed payphones remain.