There I was, talking on an upper east side payphone, when familiar words from over 25 years ago seemed as if they had materialized before me. They were hard to see but the exhortation was undoubtedly there, hiding in plain sight. The words “GO TO CHURCH READ BIBLE” had been scratched into the payphone enclosure, but by who, and when? The words were hard to photograph because, well, they were hard to see, and I tried every Photoshop filter that seemed to make sense in an attempt to better highlight their presence. Despite not being able to do much to improve clarity I don’t think there is any doubt that the maroon-colored letters I somewhat clumsily overlaid on these two images align with the letters scratched onto the payphone enclosure. Click the images to see more detail.

UPDATE: September 2019. I have since discovered that documenting this particular scratchiti is a lot clearer using video. Here it is:

END OF UPDATE.

Some of my earliest memories of payphones in New York revolved around PRAY, the elderly female scratchiti artist who, legend said, scratched words and phrases like “PRAY” and “LOVE GOD” into every single payphone in town.

I first learned about PRAY in 1991, while working at the Lincoln Center Tower Records. A manager at the store described, with a mix of awe and bewilderment, how one elderly woman was responsible for etching these words into, as he strongly emphasized, every single payphone in New York. At the time the payphone population in New York was probably around 35,000.

From that point on I saw “PRAY” and “LOVE JESUS” emerge from the surface of every payphone I saw, or at least it seemed that way. It was one of many things that led me to regard payphones as a focal point of obsession, and that has led me to stop and look at payphones in case they have a message for me. The fact that it is still possible to find evidence of PRAY on the streets is not exactly like finding dinosaur bones but I think it’s amazing that one woman’s message, obsessively and consistently scratched countless thousands of times, is still connecting with people like me, just out there on the street talking on a payphone.

But in the early 1990s I had more of a religious streak than I do now. One of the first things I posted to the Internet was a poem called “The Lord“, which I wrote around 1992 or 1993; and in those days I made my first feeble attempts at going to church. Those messages etched into payphones resonated with me then in a way they no longer do.

But a few months ago, when I saw these words rise up from this payphone, I felt a small wave of religiosity come back. I spotted the same words on two other payphone enclosures in the area and, thus inspired by the densest concentrations of PRAY sightings in years, I must have looked like a loon stopping at every single payphone I saw and studying it for traces of PRAY.

Just like 1991 all over again, I was out and about looking for God in a payphone.

Among the words and phrases I remember seeing were “PRAY”, “WORSHIP GOD”, “MERCY”, “LOVE JESUS”, and “THANK GOD”, the last of which I spotted just a couple of years ago:

PRAY is mentioned in virtually any historical narrative about graffiti in New York, and the consensus is that no one knows who she was but that she and she alone did most if not all of the religious etchings on New York’s payphones. No one knows definitively if that is true or not but she is probably the most famous scratchiti artist ever, and if she was not responsible for the sightings I made recently then the copycats were surely inspired by PRAY to continue her work.

Her reputation even echoed in the pages of the Wall Street Journal, in a seminal payphone-related story published September 8, 1983 about the state of phone booths and payphones in NYC and beyond. The piece, under the oh-so-clever headline “What Has Come To Pay Telephones? Change, of Course”, included comments from James Horris, a New York Telephone employee who, in expressing his misgivings about the content of the etchings, seemed to think they were all the work of one person:

“For several years, someone has been scratching ‘Worship God’ on countless outdoor pay phones in the city, and more recently ‘Pray’ has been added to many of the enclosures. James Horris, who heads pay-phone operations for New York Telephone, says he is ‘curious’ about the admonitions, believed to be the work of one vandal. ‘There are a lot of other messages I’d feel more comfortable with,’ he adds.”

The important point is not what messages Mr. Horris would have preferred (huh?) but that few others would have had as much exposure to PRAY’s etchings as he. If Horris thought it was the work of one person that buttresses my belief that the “GO TO CHURCH” sightings I made a few months ago are truly the work of PRAY.

It is, appropriately enough, a matter of faith.

I was contacted some years ago with a journalist from a website that I don’t remember the name of. He seemed to know everything there was to know about PRAY, and was writing an article about the subject. He wanted me to contribute something from my sightings of PRAY over the years. I never heard from him again and his e-mail address and name were lost in a web server blowout. I thought of him when I made these recent discoveries, thinking he might be able to make an informed analysis of whether or not these were her work. But I don’t know who he was!