At first glance I thought someone had placed flowers and a Mother Mary statue as a Descanso within this old clamshell payphone enclosure on Fresh Pond Road in Queens. I next thought the object at bottom left was a candle.
The statue may or may not represent Mother Mary with child Jesus, but the supposed candle turned out to be a bucket for butts. Cigarette butts. The figurine looks like it has a telephone wire going in and out the top of its head. If I tapped her on the forehead maybe she would have emitted a dial tone.
No Descanso here. It’s just someone’s noble effort to beautify another eyesore left behind by a payphone owner who failed to clean up after themselves upon removing one of their devices. Abandoned payphone carcasses like this litter the countryside.
I spotted this outside the Sideshow Skate Shop, on Fresh Pond Road near 62nd Road, in a part of Queens you might call either Ridgewood or Maspeth. On a map it looks like you could possibly call it Maspeth. In the context of my journey that day it felt more like Ridgewood. These things have a way of morphing in my mind, depending where I might have left thoughts drifting behind.
An extra bit of telephonic oldness at this intersection comes from the neighboring Queens Instrument Company, which has evidently done business at this spot for a long time. They still have the old telephone exchange name formatted phone number on their signage: EVergreen 6-4343, which in modern parlance translates as 718-386-4343. I first spotted this EVergreen phone number in May, 2010.
I spotted these items in the middle of a 15+ mile walk through Queens, a walk in which I unexpectedly found the answer to a lingering question: Does Arby’s exist in New York? This infinitesimally trivial question, easily answerable but not even important enough for me to lift my fingers and type the question into a searchie, nevertheless hovered in my mind since about a year ago, after a question about Arby’s came up in a game of Cards Against Humanity.
On my journey this day I encountered the Arby’s at Metropolitan Avenue and 69th Street. That answered the question in a way I prefer. I did not have to use a commercial searchie as a crutch. I found the answer by exploring the real world. Too bad the question essentially did not matter.
