This old, abandoned payphone looked like it was hiding, and doing its best to blend in with the woodwork at the Silver Star Restaurant, 1238 Second Avenue in Manhattan. Its number, I find myself somewhat incredibly able to report, appears to have been either 212-650-0755 or 212-650-0746. Those numbers, both disconnected, match with the restaurant name and street address in the Payphone Project’s data museum of mostly defunct but occasionally still active payphone numbers.

Matching derelict and abandoned payphones to their former phone numbers does not happen often around here, but I appreciate when it does. It makes me feel that some day, in some way, the old payphone location data will play a part in solving a real world mystery. This, in fact, has happened any number of times during the 20+ year run of this website, as most notably reported by the New York Times all those years ago. But I think more possibilities for that kind of informational kismet continue to inhabit the old payphone location data.

No scratchiti to speak of on the metal surface of the Silver Star phone, and certainly no PRAY, sightings of which have remained a quest of mine since I first landed in New York in 1990.

Something I wish I had done better in my years of taking more pictures of New York City’s payphones than any single person ever was get detail photos of the payphones’ informational placards, usually found under the keypad and above the coin vault. Among other bits of information supposed to be contained on these little scraps of paper was the name of the company that owned the phone and a number you could call to complain about problems. This kind of info, its presence required by city and state laws, often times was not there.

The payphone owner might have been Telebeam, a New York City payphone service provider established in 1984 still in business today. Or it might have been Underdog Communications, Paca-Tel, Reliatel, or maybe even the mysterious TELVAST, a company name that briefly revealed itself on a Queens Boulevard payphone earlier this year.

This payphone at the Silver Star Restaurant, probably hanging at this spot since the early 1990s, was owned by Cristol-Tel Services. That entity that turns up in a few scattershot Internet search results, but they shed little light on anything about the company. Needless to say this phone had no dial tone.

The phone number shown on the placard is disconnected and the street address today is occupied by a dental practice.

I used to check in at the Silver Star when I lived on the Upper East Side. I bought myself a phat dinner there to celebrate the end of my involvement with the Apology Line, a telephone confessional art project I worked on in the early 1990s. My initial enthusiasm for the project eventually cooled, and in time I would say it soured altogether. But once in a while I still listen to some of the digitized audio of the cassette tapes I acquired through my work on Apology, and I still have some copies of Apology Magazine, which I helped create. The idea of publishing a magazine based on telephone confessionals received by Apology was actually mine, though I cannot give myself too much credit for coming up with so predictable a suggestion.

Apology’s most memorable calls came from payphones, and by my estimation the atmosphere of anonymity that characterized Apology made payphones a central conduit for callers and listeners alike.