Continuing my lightly-updated series of “Then and Now” pictures of payphones in New York City, I spent the last few days tracking down payphones which I photographed ten years ago in this very month of May, Y2K.

Ten years later I find that many of the payphones are gone, but a surprising number survive. Many of these locations were easy enough to find again, but oh to have had GPS-enabled digital cameras in 2000. It would have made this project of tracking down photos I took a decade ago so much easier.

I am not complaining, though, as the little mysteries of finding the exact spots turned this little project into something of a treasure hunt. Over the next week or two I will share my findings, starting with this story.

It is weirdly satisfying to spot the ignoble remains of an uprooted payphone. Sometimes a wire rises up from the sidewalk, but in most cases the memory of a payphone gone is signaled by 4 metal spikes within a rectangular indentation in the sidewalk. If you look for these echoes of payphones past you will spot them on most city sidewalks, on corners and outside convenience stores.

This payphone at 35th Avenue and 34th Street in Astoria (and the beautiful woman using it) have been replaced by an attractive metal box, painted black and secured with a tiny padlock.

I don’t know if I ever used this payphone but I remember sitting on that metal box which replaced it. At some obscene hour of the early 2:45 A.M. I sat there on a cold December night, trying to comfort a troubled friend who sat on the other metal box, crying and angry.

Amazingly, it looks like the same white van is still parked in almost the exact same spot, a full decade later. That’s… actually kinda weird, because I’ve looked at all the pictures I took today and compared them with the other shots from May of 2000 and I’m serious, it really does look like the exact same van.

If you look deeper into the first picture from 2000 you’ll see that the crosswalk signals had the plain English DON’T WALK, whereas today those old light-bulb-based signs are replaced by allegedly superior LED lights with semiotic indications of whether to walk or stand still. I don’t mind the symbolics but I have come to distrust and even revile these crosswalk signs, which look like toothless glad hands when half of their little lights don’t work and which are dangerously confusing when both the WALK and DON’T WALK signals light up simultaneously — AS HAPPENS ALL THE FREAKIN’ TIME AND AS MAKES ME AND OTHERS STOP DEAD IN OUR TRACKS SO WE CAN LOOK EVERY WHICH WAY TO ANALYZE THE INTERSECTION AND THE TRAFFIC PATTERNS SO WE CAN FIGURE OUT IF IT IS SAFE TO CROSS THE FREAKIN’ STREET.

Ahem.

Getting back to the payphone, the sidewalk itself probably bears the tell-tale four spikes within a rectangle indicating that a payphone used to be there, but that detritus is hidden under that beautiful black box.

Along the wall are pockmarks, looking out like puzzled, emptied eyesockets, where screws and bolts once secured the payphone and the metal frame bearing its sign to the wall of the building.