A couple of payphone-related items that allude to this site in name and/or spirit crossed my desk last week. The “Baseball Payphone Stadium Project” appeared at BaseballProspectus.com, documenting the work of Pepper Hastings in attempting collect payphone numbers from all 26 Major League Baseball stadiums. The goal, as quoted by writer Larry Granillo, was “To publish – before the beginning of the pennant races – a complete list of stadium pay phone numbers where up-to-the-second game information can be obtained from on-the-scene game correspondents (a guy on his way back from the snackbar, a conscientious usher, a kid on his way to the souvenir stand).”

It’s a pretty cool payphone story. Read it here.

Near the end of the BaseballProspectus.com piece is an image of the list of baseball stadium payphone numbers Pepper Hastings collected. Just for fun I looked them up on the Payphone Project Phone Number Data Museum and found that some of these baseball stadium payphone numbers are actually listed here.

The two payphones at Boston’s Fenway Park are listed on there respective pages:
(617) 247-8326 and (617) 247-7133 are listed, but don’t bother calling them. I tried, and my calls could not be completed as dialed.

The Shea Stadium number — (718) 699-8895 — is found on this New York City Payphones page. The Yankee Stadium number — (212) 220-7337 — is buried on this ugly page of NYC Payphone Locations. Neither of those numbers are in service today.

Seattle’s Kingdome payphone is listed (with a mis-spelling) at (206) 345-9066, and another “Kingdone” payphone is listed at (206) 223-9740. Calls to those numbers today fail.

I had never heard of the baseball stadium payphone endeavor until now, but it is amazingly similar in spirit to some of my earliest collecting of New York City payphone numbers and locations. After the bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993 I made an effort to collect as many payphone numbers and location as I could find in the Twin Towers. I imagined this list of numbers could be a useful resource to journalists and reporters in the event of another attack on the Trade Center. I don’t know if I lost those numbers or if I somehow felt weird about making them available in that spirit, but I do have this old photo of some Twin Tower Payphones. I also gathered several Shea Stadium payphone numbers in the spirit of inviting reporters and radio announcers to call the stadium in the event that something sensational happened with the Mets.

Another payphone project-named web site is the Payphone Revival. This project is supported in part by the City of Austin, Texas, and endeavors to “transform and repurpose abandoned payphone equipment.” The Revival Project web site includes images from earlier installations, including The Cabinet, by J.P. Marquardt; and Lindsay Palmer’s Installation at 12th and Branch Streets.

I dubbed my payphone web pages the “Payphone Project” back in 1995. I’ve never been fond of the name, though others have said they think it’s catchy. I borrowed the term from a phone-art project I worked on during the early 1990s. That project was the Apology Line, better known to me as the Apology Project, a free telephone confessional established by Allan Bridge on October 20, 1980.

When we first met Allan somewhat ruefully told to me that his use of the word “project” signaled that he had yet to find a clear direction for Apology. In time he quit using the word “project”, simply calling the telephone line and its associated publications “Apology”. I interpreted that to mean he was at least somewhat satisfied that his work had reached maturity.

Speaking of site names, a few eagle-eyed observers may have noticed that I spun off two new web sites from the original Payphone Project: PayphoneNews.com picks up with all the payphone-related news and stories I posted since February 2004. There were other payphone stories before that but I can’t find them. After a few false starts and some indecision regarding what software to use I finally modernized the publishing system on a fully new platform. I hesitated in migrating the old payphone stories, since so many of them link to now-defunct web sites or to stories that were removed from the Internet years ago. And I also questioned the whole idea of payphone news. How much “news” is there in this realm? (More than you might think…) Nevertheless, everything from the old site made it to the new, as did a number stories which for some reason I never published.

The other new spinoff site is PayphonePictures.com, a site which takes the photo gallery from the Payphone Project and fits it into a more modern and flexible photo gallery format. That site includes just about everything from the old Gallery section of the Payphone Project, with payphone photos from all 7 continents — even Antarctica Payphones. I also added a new section of Payphones as seen in Movies and on Television.