The payphone room at NYU Langone's Tisch Hospital today functions as more of a broom closet than a place to make a phone call. Not only did one of these phones actually work, but its volume control button did as well. That's rare.
According to Payphone Project data there used to be 2 payphones at this Manhattan restaurant. One phone remains, in non-working order. I was surprised but satisfied to find that its now-disconnected phone number appears in this website's payphone location data museum.
Conducting a guided tour of payphones around Union Square was not exactly in my comfort zone. But I did it anyway, and while the tour was in progress I just happened to spot a couple of new-to-me payphones inside a government building.
Woodhull Medical Center in Brooklyn retains three working payphones, down from the dozens upon dozens that formerly inhabited the place.
100% of Grand Central Terminal's payphones work. Hooray for the brave old world. Unfortunately for me this dude happened to be using one of the phones I planned to use. I later made the call from Penn Station.
I made a small pilgrimage out to Great Neck, Long Island on Saturday, to check in on the phone booth at Steppingstone Park. Admission to Steppingstone requires a park card. I had no such card but the woman at the front entrance was nice enough to let me in "this one time".
Some of the MTA's Intersection-produced "On the Go Travel Station's this weekend and into Monday displayed a tantalizing bottom window that looked like a portal to the open Internet. It probably was not that but I had fun poking at it.
I own a two-heads-missing print of Jim Munroe's famous phone booth stuffing photo from 1959. My friend Chad Dickerson and I knew exactly what to do with it one night at the Time & Life Building in September, 2000.
A couple of unrelated encounters on a Sunday afternoon proved once again (not that it was ever lost on me) that people other than me still use payphones.
You think no one uses payphones anymore? You are wrong.
So what if it's a longshot? If this actually connects it would be pretty cool. Anyone in the vicinity of Winnsboro, South Carolina, is welcome to take away a couple of old payphones, at no charge, so long as you have the ability to remove them. Click for details and contact info.
How do calls made from LinkNYC machines compare to the payphones they will replace? Not so well in this example. I think the payphone wins hands down, although the location of the devices makes it a tough test for LinkNYC's fully exposed microphone and loudspeaker.
At Rockefeller Center today, a payphone handset that looked like it was covered in fœces might have in fact been caked with some kind of chocolate ice cream/vanilla swirl tar. I did not conduct a taste test.
If a payphone like this can make outgoing calls, what possible scenario could arise where someone would have legitimate reason to do that?
This rotary dial payphone at Veronica's Bar (née Mike's Place, née St. Mark's) disappeared to a storage closet years ago.
People make fun of me for my otaku-like fixation but when I found these old beauties last week I felt like a kid in a candy shop.
Checked in on an old favorite today: The rotting, festering phone booths at the 79th Street Boat Basin. This is the green-colored style of booth seen in "Panic In Needle Park", "Midnight Cowboy", and other 1970s-era films made in New York. I don't know of any other booths like this in the wild today.
TO DESIRE IMMORTALITY IS TO DESIRE THE ETERNAL PERPETUATION OF A GREAT MISTAKE... Wait, what?
This abandoned phone, once owned by Path Enterprises, Inc., was an unexpected find on a stretch of East Linden Avenue between Linden and Elizabeth, New Jersey.
I canvassed the Broadway/Lafayette BDFM and Bleecker Street 6 subway stations for payphones. This is what I saw. This is what I heard.
I've used this payphone a number of times in attempts to record nearby subway musicians, rarely if ever with any luck.
Should I recognize the dude in this picture? It appears to be the work of a professional photographer, Thomas J. Rodriguez. So who's the guy in the phone booth? And why is the print a mirror image?
I checked in on the phone booths at Peter McManus Café on 7th Avenue. The booths looked beautiful but neither phone worked.
The font used on this set of touchtone buttons is nothing special in and of itself. But I felt the rugged, weathered quality of these little buttons, punched poked and pounded for however many years, made them worth singling out.
I never heard of TELVAST until its name surfaced on a Queens Boulevard payphone. I found no trace of the company's existence in online or offline resources. Putting it up for grabs here in case anyone knows anything about the company or the word itself.
My visit to the Four Star Diner started with an abandoned Verizon payphone. It ended with me asking if I had truly experienced "the delicious 'EAT'" during my visit.
This abandoned phone at an Elmhurst laundromat offered no clue as to its previous owner.
One more payphone in my area disappeared with no LinkNYC replacement. A similar fate seems to have befallen a pair of phones on Manhattan's Upper East Side.