A true end of an era in New York City payphones seems to be upon us. The last of the "Independents" appears to be finally on its way to history. That is, unless a concerned buyer can buy it with the purpose of keeping at least one more working publicly-accessible alive. We can hope for miracles, right?
Action shot from today. Reliable sources tell me this phone does about $1.50 in business a day. But it shouldn't be about business, or profits, should it? Phones like this should be subsidized in the public interest. People would still use public pay telephones, if only they could.
The bronze statue, by Milton Hebal, still stands outside the Delacorte Theater. The payphones didn't make it.
This beauty lurks at 7th Avenue at 33rd street, downstairs in the Penn Station 1/2/3 station, outside the Sbarro. No identifying information remains with respect to which of New York’s once-abundant independent payphone service providers left this one behind. What a phone like this needs, of course, is a couple of Payphone Radio cards to…
I finally got at the payphones in Carnegie Hall for the first time since pandemic. Carnegie has a vax card requirement for entry. This made me think they’d only allow people in if they had tickets for a concert or other legitimate business there. Maybe that was true before but I got through today with…
CityBridge, the same consortium responsible for LinkNYC and Link5G, let this filthy payphone totem, reeking of piss/shit/I don’t want to know what else, molder in plain site for years at 42nd Street and 5th Avenue. These Smart City’s filthgasms finally disappeared last month, presumably to make way for a Smart City LinkNYC 5G skyscraper or…
![The New Link5G LinkNYC Skyscrapers Close-Up [Video]](https://www.payphone-project.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/DSC09621-250x180.jpg)
The Intersection/Google/CityBridge Smart City monopoly continues to fail up. The future of public communications, the next evolution of the payphone, looks like this. Meet Link5G. Some shoddy workmanship and general ugliness. If the LinkNYC rollout was any indication we can look forward to 7 or 8 of these 5G absolute necessities on every intersection in…
Thanks solely to the Simon & Garfunkel song "America" I long maintained a romanticized notion of the New Jersey Turnpike, and the very word "turnpike" itself. Long, dark corridors of travel and imagination, falling in love with strangers, making millions off royalties from songs written about those strangers.
I would swear I found PRAY on one of these payphones some years ago. Finding any photos I captured of it seems impossible now. Also, this domain name might be for sale. The content, I'm told, is worth nothing. Maybe the domain name is?
I found myself watching a church sermon today, live streamed on Facebook from the Faith Church on Fear Street in Eau Claire, Wisconsin. I am not religious, despite having attended Catholic schools from the 3rd grade all the way through high school. I attend a church once in a while. My only interest is the…
In this lot today you also might find air machines, countertop video games, internet-connected jukeboxes, tchotchke dispensers, claw machines, change-makers, etc. Any coin- or cash-fed device you encounter today is quite possibly operated by payphone owners of yore.
A series of photos, shot this month on hand-rolled Arista 400 B&W film, by Daniel Hopsicker in Charleston, West Virginia. All of these payphone work, and one Airlite phone booth even includes a fully functioning door that opens and closes.
The owner at this lot yelled at me to get off his property, even though I never set foot on it. I managed to get a few shots in anyway, after spotting this dead phone at 74-21 Queens Boulevard in November, 2013. It disappeared soon after. Amazingly, I was able to determine this long-dead payphone's number. Now disconnected, its number was 718-429-9710.
Nothing much on the payphone front in Jersey City but I did take a crack at JC's CityPost totems, which somewhat resemble LinkNYC in form but not in function. Wi-Fi speeds were useless, but unlike LinkNYC there seems to have been thought put into letting advertising and useful information coexist on the advertising screens without the ads disappearing altogether.
Next time you make it to the Whitehall Staten Island Ferry Terminal maybe make a couple of calls from the now-working payphones. All but one is back in service. If you are in the company of a younger person who's never encountered a payphone it could be fun to have them make a phone-call the old-fashioned way.
I would have bet cash cash money this sucker was gone but here it is, today, red as ever.
One consequence of making 988 live is that some areas of New York finally had to switch to 10-digit dialing. That's not something I keep track of but I was surprised by how many areas still let you get away with just dialing 7 digits for local calls in this year of 2021. This is a video tour of some old payphone favorites, with tests of LinkNYC's ability to reach 988.
If you can find a CityBridge payphone with dial tone your attempts to make calls will send you into a confusing series of billing options, including calling card or even collect calls. CityBridge has let its Verizon Wireless account expire, leaving ownership of their payphones up for grabs, it seems.
There was something fishy about this abandoned, unusually derelict payphone enclosure, owned by CityBridge. With payphone enclosures like this required to be gone by the end of 2021 it may not be much longer we get to enjoy this bit of accidental art, where the forces of entropy and accumulation seem to coexist. Gotta love that fish dangling from a wire. Who did this?
I thought all the outdoor payphones around Times Square were long gone. I missed these non-working CityBridge masterpieces, at 7th Avenue and 50th Street. And also: What really keeps the payphone business alive today?
Someone had their graffiti A-game on placing images of the Fisher-Price Chatter Phone on this derelict CityBridge payphone enclosure. Found on Third Avenue, where the LinkNYC stampede began, it seems that going forward old payphones and enclosures like this will be replaced with redesigned "Link5G" kiosks, æsthetic monstrosities rising 32 feet into the air.
Rutherford did not look too promising at first but once I found the right section old dead payphones started turning up. Most interesting find here was an old ETS phone, a relic of one of the biggest scams to ever hit the payphone industry.
A look back at the payphones of Coney Island's past, with a link to my video documenting the last payphones of Coney Island and Brighton Beach.
Just a little window into what should be the unseen innards of a CityBridge payphone enclosure. It appears this clear acrylic sheet was used to protect display advertising panels from corrosive effects of ultraviolet light.
This working payphone stands outside the Darien Telephone Company building in Darien, Georgia. Shot on film last month this enclosure has a dome-covered light fixture resembling the prop payphone used in “Little Miss Sunshine.” No word on whether the light worked on this old enclosure in Darien. Photos are by Daniel Hopsicker, a regular contributor…
I've been hunting down what's left of the payphones in the five boroughs of New York, as well as some New Jersey cities. This week sent me to Orange, NJ, where I likely would have found more than these specimens had I headed east instead of west. I'll be back.
This one might be gone already. Somewhere in Gowanus, a decrepit, derelict, useless hulk of a payphone past.
Spotted this on Labor Day, 2001, near the old Twin Towers. Never saw a payphone truck again in the wilds.