I once conducted a guided tour of the payphones in and around Union Square. I am happy to have done it but it is not something I expect to do again. It just does not suit me, and I knew this going in, but I went ahead anyway, thinking it couldn’t be all bad to step outside my comfort zone once in a while.

While conducting this tour I made a new payphone discovery. I spotted, from the sidewalk outside, a couple of payphones inside the Union Square Job Center at 109 East 16th Street. I had intended ever since to get back and see if they worked, and one recent Monday in this month of May found me there again. I failed to get decent pictures of these on account of my thinking photography of government buildings is illegal. Security guards have shooed me away from government buildings plenty of times, and I would have expected the same or worse treatment here. So I made haste, and it shows. I will try again another time.

The numbers for these 2 phones, which both have dial tone, are 212-473-8955 and 212-473-8644. It doesn’t look like either of these phones appeared on this website’s directory of payphone numbers. Calling either of these sends you to the phone’s internal modem. The phones are owned by PTS (Pacific Telemanagement Services), the nation’s largest payphone service provider. Like a lot of payphone-related entities the website for PTS seems to have gone dark.

I made a bit of conversation with someone in the foyer where these phones stand. He was doing something on his smartphone when he saw me getting photos of the payphones. He laughingly asked “Payphones? What the hell are those?” I responded “That’s what I asked”, even though that is not true.

The guided tour of Union Square payphones started at 15th Street and 3rd Avenue, the famed and forever-historic site of the first-ever LinkNYC activation. Hah. Actually, after introducing LinkNYC and explaining why a payphone tour started with something other than a payphone I made a prediction: While there is a plaque in Hartford, Connecticut, memorializing the sight of the world’s first public telephone I do not believe a similar marker would be left at this location to document the world’s first LinkNYC installation. We shall see.