This decrepit old payphone stands miserably outside the Crown Motor Inn, an hourly rates motel on Queens Boulevard in Woodside, Queens. Considering its clientele it is not hard to imagine this payphone getting lots of use back in the day as cheating husbands and wives sought to disguise their true location by calling home from behind the anonymizing shield of an unlisted payphone.

Alas, if anyone tried to use this phone lately then that might explain it being savagely smashed to bits. Anyone really needing to make a phone call – possibly at their wits end if they are considering using a payphone – could be sent over the brink of sanity should that payphone not even work.

It was hard to determine who was once responsible for the maintenance and operation of this phone. That is because the informational placard which should contain that information is bludgeoned with Crown Motor Inn-worthy stains to explain, stains which obscure the text matter beneath.

Through the magnifying glass of 20+ megapixel photography was revealed the former owner of this phone, the company’s name in teeny-tiny type but barely visible beneath the stains. The phone was owned by New York Telestone Communications Corp., a defunct company that used an Oakland Gardens P.O. Box as its business address.

Telestone is among the dozens of defunct New York City payphone service providers which, upon ceasing their payphone operations, failed to clean up after themselves. Telestone and others (Underdog, PayTEL, etc.) simply left their inventory of payphones out on the sidewalks and inside places of business, where I would estimate hundreds still linger today, 10-15 years on.

I spotted another Telestone phone in Flushing, in October, 2013. I might swing by there some time soon to see if it is still there.

I posted mention of this Telestone street litter on Twitter. In response an acquaintance from the real world of the payphone business inquired if I had reported the phone to 311. I had not and did not. I think I may have (or at one time had) the attention of city agencies responsible for enforcing removal of derelict payphones. Every time I posted something about an abandoned payphone to these web sites the phone was removed within a short period of time, even if the phone had been abandoned for many years. I could well have simply imagined a connection.