This photo of two random New Yorkers carrying on unrelated conversations within spitting distance of each other using New York Telephone payphones first appeared at the highly addictive NYC NOSTALGIA blog at Tumblr.com. The NYC Nostalgia blog makes me sad for its images of the human New York that I almost missed, but that still existed and lingered in the air for a number of years after I landed here in 1990. Today’s New York is about money. Nothing else.
The closest kindred-spirit photo I have to shake hands with the NYC Nostalgia blog’s 1987 image is this one, from circa 2000 or 2001, at Broadway around 50th Street:
I looked through the photos of payphones, and saw the diversity of locations at which payphones could be found, not very long ago. Indeed in on photo of a four-way intersection in New York City, that appeared to be shortly after sunrise, there were three sets of bays of payphone on each of three corners of the intersection, and one phone in a bay in the background a[[eared to be being used even at that early hour. Payphone could be found almost anywhere not very long ago. Although this is definitely not whiz-bang technology it works just fine and serves a useful public purpose. More payphone are needed and should be installed all across the United States of America as well as in other countries