This set of four payphones and the individuals using them no longer stand at the corner of 50th Street and Broadway in Manhattan. This picture is from April, 2001. The pictures at the end of this story, showing the same spot where these payphones used to be, are from September, 2009.

I remember this picture well. It was my “Big Picture” for April 5, 2001. I like this image because it shows a time, in everyday non-crisis situations, when one should have expected to wait in line to use a public phone. I regularly waited for a half-hour or longer to use the payphones at the Parc Lincoln Hotel, and once I got my turn I stayed alert, looking around (like these folks) to see who was antsy to use the phone I had in my hand.

At the Parc Lincoln altercations occurred when impatient individuals waiting to use the payphones heckled those whose conversations dragged on the longest — the Payphone Hogs, as they were known.

“It’s a ‘public phone‘, Holmes! You can’t talk all day!” came the cat calls from the peanut gallery of the steadily increasing number of people waiting to use the phone. Sometimes the callers would, after ending their call, offer apologies, contrition, and even details of their conversation. “I was talking to my mother!” one woman bleated in a feeble attempt to appease a particularly vitriolic complainant.

Usually, though, the payphone hogs just slinked out at the end of their 6-hour conversation, ignoring the invective and swatting cigarette butts flicked at their heads.

I don’t mean to imply that the people in the above picture are Payphone Hogs. They are not Payphone Hogs, at least as far as I can detect from their body language. These folks are just talkin’.

In a way the behavior of hogging payphones has simply transferred itself. Those who might have made themselves conspicuous by hogging public phones now do the same with cell phones, loudly blasting their private conversations into the faces of strangers, drawing attention to themselves and thus raising the urgency and the perceived significance of their private conversations, but without the inconvenience of having to get off the phone.

In the realm of bottlenecking telecommunication resources today I think the Payphone Hog behavior is seen on file-sharing networks in the form of those individuals who bog down Internet Service Providers with bandwidth-saturating Blu-ray movie downloads.

In the early and mid-1990s I remember how aggravating were the Modem Hogs — those individuals who monopolized modems on dial-up BBSes and Interactive Services, dialing in and staying dialed in 24 hours a day. Now that I think of it, I might have been one of the Modem Hogs. Oof. I don’t think I was ever much of a Payphone Hog, though.

If you want to talk on a payphone today you would probably have the phone to yourself for as long as you wish.

The payphones seen in the first picture are gone. Here is that corner today, with a picture of some metal spikes in the sidewalk — evidence that these payphones used to be here, at 50th Street and Broadway.