Payphones Past

Almost Perfect Airlight Phone Booth

Phone Booth Near Lynchburg VA

Daniel Hopsicker delivers this photo of an outdoor full-sized metal phone booth about as close to perfect as one could expect in this year 2020. Sure, the door is missing, but I consider that a feature, since closing the door on these old booths had a way of making me claustrophobic.

Phone Booth Near Lynchburg VA

Also, as for the missing door actually being a bonus, given the booths apparent presence on a driveway or roadway it seems you want that door out of the picture should an out-of-control or drunk-driven vehicle come barreling down that stretch of pavement. That’s no hypothetical scenario, as the infamous case of Bigbee versus Pacific Telephone and Telegraph makes clear, phone booths of yore were not necessarily considered the safest structures.

But that’s a topic for another discussion. At play here is a fully functioning payphone owned by PTS in what most likely used to be a Verizon branded metal phone booth.The Verizon brand would have been on top, where the black objects cover the old logo.

Daniel writes:

I found this phone booth over the summer, and just got around to checking it out again. It’s at the Eagle Erie Baptist Conference Center off of Route 501 just a few miles northwest of Lynchburg, VA. This booth is in complete working order, accepting coins for long distance calls. It even sounds loud and clear when talking to someone on it! So this full size booth survives into the ’20s with full working order (minus the bi-fold door).

the payphone project

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Name says:

February 19, 2020 at 4:22 pm

There used to be a lot of these near PA Toll stops. Sometime around 2016/17, they were removed and either gone completely or replaced by typical pedestals. I did not see every toll stop, so there could be a phonebooth still standing at least one of them.