It’s true. I don’t here much these days. That doesn’t mean my hands are idle. Quite the opposite. I don’t know when it happened, or if there was a moment of clarity, but posting stories to websites started to feel like futility incarnate. Why post here to an audience of a few dozen when inane TikTok videos get millions of views and the presumption of credibility granted by the internet’s most precious currency: popularity.

I sporadically engage with social media, and will admit that I’ve made some meaningful and interesting connections there, my cynical preconceptions bedamned. I even got a couple of leads on derelict payphones in these 5 boroughs of New York City, though I maintain that most of my finds are a result of independent research and just plain luck.

Luck was the only force connecting me to this old relic at a laundromat in Corona last week. I was on an MTA stramble, going wherever the buses and subways took me, exiting when something looked interesting, or when a fellow passenger on the bus or train seemed like a creep. Exiting at 90th Street I had a foggy memory of seeing this phone before, but at the time I didn’t have the nerve to enter the place and take a photo when I otherwise had no legitimate business there. It felt like stealing. Maybe that’s what this amounts to but for some reason it didn’t stop me this time.

One of my regrets from having taken photos of payphones since the mid 1990s is how few of the informational placards I thought to document. Those placards contained names and contact info for the dozens upon dozens of independent payphone service providers who got in on the payphone gold rush which saw payphones pop up seemingly everywhere. So many of these companies, only ever identified on those placards, will forever vanish from the annals of public communications history.

On this account it was satisfying to raise at least one payphone service provider of yore from the ash heap of oblivion. Ascot COmmunincations, which used a Greenwood Lake PO Box as its business address, left its identifying information on this phone. All I could find on this company was a couple of listings on my website.

I was also in that part of Queens intending to check in on Talk To Me, Jordan Seiler’s payphone performance art piece which connects strangers at random via repurposed payphones placed throughout the five boroughs. You pick up one Talk To Me phone and all the others start ringing until someone answers. I’ve had some interesting encounters via Talk To Me, and guess what, that is my voice at the start of the audio reel at TalkToMeNYC.com.

If this website seems quiet you can find more of my shenanigans on YouTube, Twitter, and TikTok.