I procured a VCR for the purpose of digitizing some of my old VHS tapes moldering away in a bedroom drawer. The VHS tapes filling my bureau drawers are almost all unmarked, but after getting the VCR in January I finally, after many years of intending to, started wading through them. I knew this was…
An unexpected payphone find in Ozone Park, Queens, led to a trip through its Streetview then-and-now history from 2007, when the phone probably still worked, through 2022. My video shows what this forgotten Verizon relic looks like today. This is also a test to see if I can get video to play from the top page, not just on the story page.
That payphone is supposed to be gone. The City and DoITT made the bizarre and uninformed announcement in May that the last sidewalk payphones of New York City had been plucked from a spot near Times Square. How could they forget this one, and the numerous others that remained until a few months after that echo-chamber of a press event?
It’s become a chore, I’m sorry to say, to post content to this website. I don’t like WordPress anymore but it I feel stuck with it. I post more frequently to wsbj.com/sorabji, I believe on account of having set up the post-by-email gateway. It seems so much easier and enjoyable to post outside the WordPress…
Looks like someone at the MTA got their knickers in a twist over the everlasting payphone carcasses that litter New York’s subway stations. Gone as of recently are the last two phones from 6th Avenue/Bryant Park, one of which had dial tone until a few weeks before its disappearance. Also goinggoinggone are, as seen in…
Thanks to Diggy64 in the comments section of 2020’s article “PRAYphones Gone From Midtown Manhattan” we now know that work of the immortal scratchiti artist PRAY made an appearance in 1984’s Brother From Another Planet and other films as well. Here is PRAY’s appearance from that film, at about 44:38. Look for more discussion of…
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?
I brought out my boss field recorder to get all the audio of what happens when one tries to make phone calls through CityBridge’s West End Avenue phone booths. I’ve done this before but only with partial audio recorded through my camera’s mic. This time I brought a field recorder and a Radio Shack suction-cup thingy used to record phone calls.
If you encounter the West End Avenue phones yourself do not be fooled by the dial tone. Attempts to make calls send you to an automated service that appears to let you complete your call using a calling card, credit card, or by calling collect.
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…
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?
Redittors have not been the only people talking about Payphone Radio. Peter Skiera christened his new blog with a lengthy writeup of that radio stream. It is a good piece of writing. I was happy to have plenty of room to represent myself as not quite the incoherent faux-suicidal Joe Frank-wannabe weirdo some Payphone Radio…
About a month ago a Reddit user posted the phone number that connects to my Payphone Radio (212-255-2748). The Reddit thread was intended to spur discussion about the audio content heard when calling that number. That is what happened, at least at first.
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.
I could lie and say I hacked the planet getting this grubby old payphone TTY to open. Really, the thing just opened right up. Any other TTY I’ve found has the keyboard securely locked until, I assume, someone legitimately needs to use it and has connected with another TTY user or someone whose receipt of…
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.
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.
Spotted this new-to-me old Telephone EXchange Name number today: LO-8-6700. In NYC “LO” stood for “LOngacre,” and I thought that might be true for Englewood as well. But according to the Telephone EXchange Name Project in Englewood “LO” stood for “LOwell.” I found a few references to “Charles Brucker and Sons” and “Charles Brucker” at…
A woman wearing a red scarf on a warm day made this seem like something more than just another photo of someone using a payphone. Did she know I was taking her picture?
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.
The Union Square Jobs Center, at 109 East 16th Street, finally reopened, making one more working public pay telephone available, albeit only during the Job Center's office hours. I though certain this phone had been disconnected. Happy to be wrong.
When last I passed through Elizabeth I remember being surprised not just by the quantity but by the fact that most of the payphones there worked. The latter is not true today but I did find one working public telephone in Elizabeth, along with a couple of unusually beefy Calstar phones.
UPDATED 5-11-2022: A few nits to pick. Only one working phone remains at Penn Station, and I fully verified that as of this week none of the phones in CityBridge’s West End Avenue phone booths actually work, not even for 911. This question gets bandied about once in awhile, often on Reddit, where the gods…
I traveled down the 4 train line from Woodlawn to Fordham Road, capturing sightings of all the dead PTS payphones along the way. None of them worked and none of them ever will. I also spotted a couple of non-PTS phones outside the subways.
A driving tour of Staten Island's abandoned payphone carcasses turned up way more specimens than expected. My favorite was the lo-rise phone at Net Cost Market on Amboy Street.
I had never been to Clifton or Passaic but I had a hunch there'd be a good quantity of old Newtel payphones on Main Avenue. I was right. Unfortunately not a single one of them worked, despite signage affixed to every single one saying "YES THIS PAYPHONE WORKS". Felt good getting out of the city, though, so it was a good day trip.
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