On the way to Beethoven Street in the Jamaica Plain section of Boston I spotted this abandoned payphone on a wall outside Yachris Market.
At the corner of Boylston and Amory Streets this phone was (and possibly still is) owned by one Prime Telecoin Services, a payphone service provider allegedly reachable at P.O. Box 1466, Boston MA, 02014. This contact information is displayed on the payphone’s informational placard:
The placard also claims that one can call a toll-free number for service and refunds. According to FCC.GOV that number (866-851-2401) belongs to NCF Communications, Inc., a payphone service provider in Bothell, Washington. I called the number and, after a couple of rings I was connected, but whoever or whatever answered the call was silent.
If the FCC’s web site is to be believed then NCF Communications should be located in this strip mall at 2020 Maltby Road in Bothell.
Numerous online sources list Prime Telecoin Service’s address as 60 Leo M. Birmingham Parkway, Brighton, MA 02135, with a phone number of 617-783-7071. I dialed that number and let it ring for a few minutes. No human answered, and no voicemail or answering machine picked up the call.
An “INSPECTED BY VERIZON” sticker, decorated with a “Kilroy Was Here” illustration, has no initials or name of a Verizon employee who may have inspected this phone.
A sticker for “Caribbean Transportation” vandalizes the inside of the payphone enclosure, probably lingering there for years and drawing very little business for the company.
According to the Remember Jamaica Plain? web site Beethoven Street was created in 1869. This happens to be the year of death for Antonie Brentano. Ms. Brentano is believed by many to have been Beethoven’s “Eternally Beloved”.
Any connection between Brentano and the naming of Beethoven Street in Boston would be intriguing if it were not impossible.
Time was short in Boston but I managed to get in a little bit of payphone hunting. I’ve added a few photos to the Massachusetts page at PayphonePictures.com, and will add more in the days to come.
The lion’s share of Boston’s public phones are owned by PTS (Pacific Telemanagement Services), a California based company that acquired assets from Verizon, AT&T, and other large telcos that gave up on payphones.
For some reason PTS has programmed its Boston payphones to show phony caller ID information to the party being called. The number (702-992-9550) appears to originate from Las Vegas but could, in fact, come from any of PTS’s thousands of payphones nationwide.
I wrote about this puzzling situation and the confusion it spawns a couple of years ago after discovering that PTS payphones in New York City were programmed in this way. Today the “Who Called Me From (702) 992-9550?” story is one of this web site’s most frequently viewed pages, drawing search engine traffic from people wondering who might have called them from Las Vegas.
I later learned that on account of that story PTS was forced to reprogram thousands of its New York City payphones to show accurate caller ID. Apparently this imperative did not reach PTS management in Boston or other cities.
More pictures of the abandoned Prime Telecoin Services payphone:
