Here is some video from my first double-digit mileage walk in over a week, from Astoria to Midtown and back, with lots of payphones, including an interesting encounter with the vaunted Rockefeller Center phone. Turns out it’s not so reliable after all. Additional comments below.

Also: “STRAMBLE”. I don’t like the word “stroll” nor the word “ramble”. The former sounds lazy and unengaged, the latter sounds like I’m lost or crazy. So I combine the two into something I think sounds more urgent, more engaged.

Some ugly Astoria architecture to start.

5:00​ – An apple and some bells.

5:32​ – Approaching the Ed Koch/Queensboro Bridge

9:11​ – Any toilet-related Bible verse?

9:50​ – Dial tone on 57th Street! I did not make a call to Payphone Radio from this phone because I expected to do that later, at Rockefeller Center. I had not placed a call to Payphone Radio from a payphone in months, but felt some fresh inspiration about it after discovering that the Payphone Radio is getting interested and interesting listeners.

11:12​ – Three yellow mats where payphones used to be. I don’t think those mats were there last time I came through this area but I don’t keep detailed records of such things so they may have been gone already.

12:28​ – Someone is still tying NYC’s payphone cords into knots. It takes a special kind of OCD… A 406 area code printed on a Manhattan phone leads to some ruminations on how area codes used to mean something. I gave up on the meaning of area codes long before broad adoption of cell phones and mobile coverage largely erased their localized relevance. It was when 386 took over much of the 904 area code in Volusia County, Florida; not only changing my father’s long-time phone number but creating an area code assigned to two different geographical areas. The logistical reasons for doing this must have been enough to force it to happen but to me the magic of an area code and its association with a physical geographical area was gone.

14:25​ – 57th Street and Lexington Avenue is where you will find some the last remnants of PRAY, one of the most persistent evangelical messengers of all time. Active in the 1970s and ’80s she was thought to have vanished pretty much altogether from the streets. But I started finding her on payphones seemingly everywhere a couple of years ago when one of her etchings appeared before me. She’s very hard to see, and some people I’ve known insist they cannot see her at all, but she is still out there.

16:05​ – Word is out: 432 Park is a dump. Look for it in the New York Times.

17:43​ – 212-744-9756 is listed on the Payphone Project. 212-684-8168 is not.

18:50​ – Memories of when I saw the most famous person I’ve ever seen up close, on Madison Avenue.

21:16​ – One of my Payphone Radio cards is still in place where I left it about a month ago, suggesting no one has even touched this phone in that period of time.

22:36​ – Midtown bathroom recommendations.

23:13​ – Are things really starting to feel normal again? What was normal, anyway? Some Rockefeller Center rambles and the 181.

26:26​ – An interesting encounter with the great Rockefeller Center payphone, as I attempt to make my first call in months to Payphone Radio from a payphone, followed by an explanation (recorded later) that the payphone itself is still plagued by a relic of the early COCOT days.

Payphones were often programmed such that the person you called heard nothing but silence for several seconds. The caller could hear them but the person who answered the phone heard nothing for up to 10 seconds. In many cases the callee, thinking no one was on the other end, would hang up. The payphone would swallow the quarter, forcing the caller to put in more coin and call again.

It was one of many behaviors of early COCOTs that made “COCOT” something of a dirty word among payphone users. This was said to be a dirty trick to skim coins off customers unlikely to go to the trouble of getting a 25¢ refund. I experienced it myself but also read complaints about it on Usenet and in one of the payphone trade journals, so it’s not my imagination.

I’ve actually known about this particular phone’s opening salvo of silence for a long time, as I’ve used it a lot over the years. I realize now that I just got just got used to waiting 10 seconds for the line to open. I disassociated that silence from the dirty tricks category and just thought of it as an idiosyncratic quirk, not really a problem since I was not calling a person but a voicemail box with a setup that did not care about the 10 seconds of silence.

In this call I was attempting to call into my newly-established Asterisk PBX, which have so far mostly left in default configurations. By default the voicemail system on Asterisk (default settings configured by FreePBX) is set to hang up after 10 milliseconds of silence. That’s pretty short. I set it to 15000 milliseconds, or 15 seconds, and will try calling again from this phone next week to see if I stay connected.

Also, enjoy the photo at 28:00​ of a Rockefeller Center security guard using this very phone. I said in the video that the photo was from 2015. It’s actually from 2012.

31:20​ – On to Grand Central with a pit stop at a former 6th Avenue payphone location from which an ex used to call me, and a survey of some payphone carnage along the way.

36:04​ – The Grand Central Station Masters Room payphone, and the basement phone near the Lost and Found. I share some memories of how the sound quality of calls made from these phones was genuinely beautiful. But they are dead, and not coming back.

41:58​ – Revisiting the dystopian eyesore CityBridge payphone on 2nd Avenue. How are they allowed to let this absurd piece of road garbage stay on the curb

42:14​ Big boat, aka “King of the Road.”