There is but one frequently asked question about this web site: Why? Why does this site exist?

The original intention of the Payphone Project was to promote random contacts among complete strangers. By listing public payphone numbers throughout America I invited people to pick up the phone and call some random street corner in some random town and talk to whoever answered.

That original purpose is now nearly moot. Virtually all payphones reject incoming calls. Those that accept calls would be programmed otherwise once people start calling them. Other payphones and phone booths sit in outlying areas (where cell phones rarely work) as a public service in case of emergencies. It would be irresponsible to encourage people to monopolize these resources by unnecessarily calling just for laughs.

I was inspired to start this site at least partly by David Letterman, who used to call public phones near the Ed Sullivan Theater and engage whoever answered in a comedy skit. Sometimes Dave would invite that person into the studio and onto the stage. The randomness of these encounters made them almost unbelievable to me. One second a person walks down the street when a curiously ringing telephone gets their attention, next thing they know they're on stage in front of 3,000 people and then on TV before millions.

Letterman still does his brand of phone routines sometimes (I still laugh outloud at the Sid Tuckman wrong number skit, but was it real?), but it does not appear that he calls payphones any more -- perhaps because so few of them accept incoming calls.

(Real or not, the Sid Tuckman bit is the funniest thing I have ever seen on television.)

To a lesser extent I was influenced by my involvement in something called The Apology Project. This art project at one time held a considerable influence over me, but I now regard it as a morose episode from my past which I no longer discuss publicly.

I was also influenced by a story I heard on National Public Radio. I don't remember when but it would probably have aired in the late 1980s or early 1990s. A story about a person, I think an American, who called random phone numbers in communist countries, war-torn areas, and poverty-stricken parts of Africa and South America. He identified himself as an American and often found that the people who answered felt this random phone call was a miracle, possibly their salvation, or at least a first step toward getting out of what misery they lived in. They asked for help, offered information, and did anything to keep the voice on the phone talking. (My memory probably embellished the actual content of the story, but that's the gist of it.)

I confess to having done this sort of thing myself, though not as boldly. At McKay Auditorium at the University of Tampa I one day discovered an unused office with a telephone that allowed international calls. I dialed random numbers for Brussels, Belgium. I chose Brussels because that's where my sister was born. I dialed many numbers before finding one that worked, and eventually I talked for several hours with someone named Paul. I said I called from America, and that I dialed his number at random. We talked mostly about America and what he knew of it. I seem to remember the TV Series "Dallas" as an entertaining subject of conversation.

I told him I would write a story about our conversation (I never did) and would send a copy if he told me his address (he declined).

I was 15 or 16 years old at the time and can't explain why but it felt powerful to do that, to pick up a phone and call any location on earth just to see who was there and to find out what they were doing.

I also remember calling a certain phone booth on Kennedy Boulevard, near the University of Tampa. At the time this part of Kennedy Boulevard was known for prostitutes and winos, and for some reason that made it an exciting place for me to call. More exciting then, say, the mall.

Often when I'd call that booth a drunk would answer. At 15 or 16 years of age I had never been drunk. It was exotic to make contact with something like that, but in a way that felt safe. For me it would have been equally exotic to call someone in some forbidden part of the world, like the person in that National Public Radio story.

I don't remember saying anything when the winos answered that phone, but my actions might sound strange: Into the phone I played tapes of myself playing piano. Sometimes people listened. Other times they hung up. I sat in my bedroom listening to the breathing of whoever listened to my tapes. I liked it best when they dropped the phone and let it hang there in the phone booth with the connection open. I imagined the sound of my piano playing drifting around the sink of iniquity called Kennedy Boulevard, and as I held the tape player to the phone I also listened to the sounds of people talking and cars driving past.

Was the phone speaker loud enough to carry sound through the air? Maybe not, but I didn't care. People picked up the phone and listened, probably with fixated bewilderment. And you know what? All these years later, that's still the way I like it.

Today I am a concert classical pianist, but I no longer play the random phone booth concert circuit.

I am still an audio voyeur. I get unreasonably excited when my stereo speakers pick up walkie-talkie or CB conversations from gypsy cab drivers outside. Sometimes I hit the "Listen" button on the intercom in my apartment. Normally you would use this intercom to ask "Who's there?" after someone rings the doorbell. I also hold down the "Listen" button to hear to what's happening downstairs and outside at the front door. Hearing mundane things through wires excites me.

Once in a while I mash the "Talk" button on thae intercom and yell "WHO'S THERE?" just for the hell of it.

 

 

But back to the original question (Why?).

The purpose and direction of this site have changed over the years.

When this site first happened in 1995 it was one page of my main web site, Sorabji.com. The Payphone Project has its own domain name now, but it is still a division of Sorabji.com.

Various parts of Sorabji.com, the payphone page among them, attracted the sort of media attention that even slightly unusual personal web sites attracted at that time.

The payphone page got special attention, though, and its audience broadened.

I invited visitors to the web site to send in their own payphone numbers. For the first several years the content of the listings came entirely from myself and from contributions sent in by site visitors.

I discovered a robust subculture of payphone number collectors. Hundreds of individuals sent in large collections of payphone numbers from their town or neighborhood. Some included photos, others included stories and comments about the payphones.

I loved the stories.

As the site continued to gain publicity I discovered something surprising: There really was a demand for this information. I discovered that people legitimately needed to match payphone numbers to their locations.

Desperate parents sent e-mail to this website saying their teenage daughter ran away and called home from a payphone, and could I please help match the number on their CallerID to its location.

Others wrote saying they received harassing phone calls from a payphone, and by finding that payphone number and its location on this site they staked out the location and identified the perpetrator (I have no knowledge of what happened next).

It made me wonder why phone companies keep this information under wraps. I know the payphone business is deregulated, but the information must exist somewhere. What is the big deal about this information? Why should it require a subpoena or a private investigator to trace a payphone location when Caller ID and even Global Positioning Systems are so common in other phone devices?

So, the original idea of encouraging random contacts among strangers was superceded by the reality that this web site performs a service. Listing numbers and locations of public telephones saved people the money and unpredictability of private detectives or local police, or just helped them get some idea of where a harrassing phone call originated.

In addition to the numbers collected by myself and others I have made available a database of about a half million payphone numbers. These numbers came from two sources: One asked not be identified, the other identified himself as a law enforcement consultant. This database is not complete, nor is it entirely accurate, reliable, or maintained. It is posted here in the hope that it is useful in one of 2 ways: identifying a specific payphone location based on a phone number that showed up on caller ID, or identifying a general area where a payphone might be located.

In the interest of public service as described above, I am very interested in working with an up-to-date public phone database from a reliable source. If you know of any such person who could provide such a database, you know where to reach me.

 

 

I began taking photos of public phones. This coincided with my development as an amateur to semi-professional photographer.

In photography and in many other activites I objectify things and put them in a list for the purpose of seeing them differently. If you know the rest of Sorabji.com you may be familiar with The Face Server, My Receipts, Pictures of Pipes, and other things. These are, simply, lists. Random lists. I believe lists are extremely powerful devices, no matter the context or even the content.

• Anyway, this week's meeting has been cancelled too
• Cucumber salad
• Twin Ram Air induction

You look squint and think about it, but it is a bulleted list of random things I just scraped off the Internet.

Listing items around a mostly arbitrary context or theme raises them out of their lone existence into something new. Successfully, it becomes impossible to think of the list items as independent pieces.

The series of phone booth and public telephone photos does not reach that level of success, but demonstrates my practice of putting objects in a list within a loosely connected context (they are all public phones of some sort, found from New York City to Antarctica and everywhere up down and all around from there).

Today, photos and stories are a big part of the site. But I also endeavor to document the evolution of the payphone as we now know it by linking out to news stories and web sites relevant to the subject.

Over time the Payphone Project has been featured in numerous publications and on television and radio. Among the newspapers to have written about the site are the New York Times, USA Today, the Washington Post, TimeoutNY, and many of the now-defunct "Internet Culture" magazines. I have also been interviewed on-camera by the BBC World News, ABC Nightly News with Peter Jennings, and NBC's Today Show. Numerous other radio and television stations throughout the world have featured the site in one way or another.

 

 

I am often asked if I think the payphone on the corner will disappear. I say, I don't think so. Certainly not any time soon. I think the assumption that public phones are doomed reflects urban bias, and assumes today's new technology will subsume all others regardless of their merit. I remember when the VCR was supposed to wipe out movie theaters. The Internet was (and still is) supposed to wipe out newspapers, magazines, libraries, retail outlets, the postal service, and to hear some people talk about it even national governments, cultures, borders, and religion. This is a common line of reasoning among technology watchers and enthusiasts. It assumes that humans, the people who actually develop and use technology, are powerless and even irrelevent against its most recent top tier of progress.

The corner payphone has evolved but, in my opinion, not to a point where the familiar payphone on the street will vanish. Demand has lessened, and the number of phones has lessened, but the demand will not evaporate. There will always be a segment of the population that can not afford private phone service, and which relies on public telephony as a point of contact with the world. Furthermore, pay-as-you-go public telephony is alive and well, and includes the thriving business of pre-paid calling cards, the new and to me interesting (but possibly vaporware) technology of disposable cell phones, and the more familiar pay-as-you-go cell phone plans offered by wireless carriers.

I sometimes get nostalgic for a time when telephone calls and electronic communication were valued. Payphones remind me of this. The sheer quantity of other means of communication today have diluted the value of communication. To what point? I am not enough of a sociologist to say. But I feel that the technologies designed to keep people connected are really more effective at keeping us apart. Technology provides so many alternatives to being together™.