"Hang Up" Ugo Massa'a payphone documentary to which I contributed last year, is playing at 3pm every Sunday in October at the Brooklyn Historical Society, at 128 Pierrepont Street. The film is short, and while my presence in the film might influence my opinions I think it is fair to say that the film beautifully and with surprising elegance crafted the story behind a subject matter most would consider coarse.
If you see something, know something, or want the NBC I-Team’s squad of gotcha journalists to publicly shame someone who did you wrong, give 1-866-NEWS-244 a call from your nearest payphone. The call is toll free and will not cost you a nickel. More importantly: No one needs to know who you are.
Acting on impulse one day late last summer, young Alfred Higley Jr. proved that honesty still lives. The 12-year-old, who lives on Bell Lane, West Shokan, had spent the day at the town pool, located a mile from his home. Ready to return home for dinner, he decided to call his mother to ask if she could pick him up in the family car.
A decrepit old payphone stands miserably outside the Crown Motor Inn, an hourly rates motel on Queens Boulevard in Woodside, Queens. Considering its clientele this payphone must have seen lots of use back in the day as cheating husbands and wives sought to disguise their true location by calling home from behind the anonymizing shield of an unlisted payphone.
Anyone who knows me much at all finds themselves afflicted by a strange condition in which they start seeing payphones everywhere. Ugo Massa is no exception. He and his circles of influence now find themselves seeing payphones everywhere, hiding in corners at train stations and airports, at shopping malls and theaters. The unicorn-like sightings are regularly reported to me in a spirit of discovering something hiding in plain sight.
Phones like this stay in place for years, not even attracting the interest of thieves. An abandoned Verizon payphone (should a thief possess skills to restore one to working order) could get a couple hundred bucks on eBay. You might even find a few bucks worth of quarters inside these payphones. With no indication that these phones are out of service nothing would stop an unwitting citizen from depositing coins and dialing a number before discovering that the phone has no dial tone.
The advertising folks at Seamless, the online food delivery service, appear to be using one of their current ad campaigns to target a curiously specific demographic: payphone users. On its surface the campaign seems to wryly address that unknowably small percentage of New Yorkers who not only use payphones — or even know what they…
Last week’s story about a fatal collapse at the Big Four Ice Caves near Verlot, Washington, includes an interesting payphone-related footnote that may have eluded most readers. Not Val Vashon, who has contributed to The Payphone Project a number of times to report Working Payphones in Seattle, Deadphone News from across Washington state, and Payphones Across America.…
This photo of two random New Yorkers carrying on unrelated conversations within spitting distance of each other using New York Telephone payphones first appeared at the highly addictive NYC NOSTALGIA blog at Tumblr.com. The NYC Nostalgia blog makes me sad for its images of the human New York that I almost missed, but that still…
Sid Tuchman. For 25 years that name haunted me. Sid was at the center of a moment which is, 2½ decades later, the funniest thing I have ever seen on television. It was also a moment (one among many) which inspired me to establish The Payphone Project web site in the early days of the…
Some time ago I commenced a project in which I intended to capture and perpetuate the memory of payphones in New York City. By mining my collection of hundreds of pictures of phones from years past I would print them out, laminate them, and place adhesive stickers on the back. My plan was to place…
I spotted this discussion, which focuses on the question of what shows up on caller ID when one receives a call from a payphone. It got me thinking. Calls from payphones can show up on caller ID in a variety of ways. If I call a cell phone from a New York City payphone it…
Erica Avery checks in again with these shots of a phone booth outside a FairPoint Communications building in Concord, Vermont. FairPoint announced in 2012 that it would exit the payphone business, selling its assets to Pacific Telemanagement Services (PTS), the nation’s largest payphone service provider. FairPoint’s branding remains on this particular phone so it’s not…
I had a camera on me but my hands were full. The moment passed before I could get coördinated enough to put down 3 shopping bags and draw the camera from my coat pocket. The missed opportunity involves the gentleman in the photo below, who I caught using a Telebeam payphone about 4 years ago.…
Between sickness and injury I’ve had a hard time moving forward on my many and varied projects. A plan to invite the public to edit and critique payphone locations mapped at NYCPayphones.com has stalled, and the most energy I’ve been able to muster in terms of updates to this site has been the Twitter feed.…
This old payphone was the site of a descanso in memory of a 10-year-old Australian girl killed at this spot in a ghastly car accident. A friend of mine — an eyewitness to the crash — described it as “the most Godawful thing I ever saw in my life.” Local residents and witnesses to the…
New York City’s Payphone Locator takes data from the city’s map of PPT (Public Pay Telephone) Locations and uses it as a starting point for a fuller, more comprehensive overview of where Gotham payphones really are in this year of 2015. I was happy but surprised when New York City first released its PPT dataset…
When I spotted this disembodied payphone component in the East River last week I immediately recognized it as the remains of a burned out, illegally discarded payphone I photographed at the same place 11 years ago in August, 2003. This object appears to be the SS Upper Armor, a style of stainless steel body guard…
The author got my age wrong, but otherwise penned a nicely done piece on the enduring value of public telephones in a cellular age. Is Anyone Still Using Pay Phones?
A slightly shorter version of this story appeared earlier at Ask A New Yorker. The so-called “payphone of the future” has come and gone a number of times since the mid-1990s. The AT&T Public Phone 2000 could be found at most major airports, along with garishly ugly contraptions such as the Atcom/Info Cyberbooth and TouchNet…
This post from Nov. 7 was updated Nov. 23, 2014, for clarity, and to make a handful of new observations. A few weeks ago I had a chance to back up the folks producing Serial, a multipart podcast from the creators of This American Life, in their research into whether or not a payphone once…
Thanks to Sarah Theeboom at Details.com for giving a shoutout to The Payphone Project’s “Heard Through a Payphone” series: How Artists Are Reinventing the Pay Phone. Listen in to my latest capture of musicians at Grand Central subway station.
Even if you actually wanted to make a call from this payphone it would be very difficult to communicate with another human. Audio coming through the earpiece of this landline payphone (718-424-2798) at 82nd Place & 63rd Avenue in Queens was completely subsumed by the sound of Radio Disney. These unintended analogue overlaps, reminiscent of…
Earlier this year John Porter (of East Harlem Unity Communications) and I appeared in “Hang Up” – a payphone documentary directed by French film maker Ugo Massa. The short film premiered at “The Auditorium” on May 27, opening the “Truth Be Told Festival” at The New School. The film is not yet available to the…
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David Letterman used to use payphones as a conduit for one of his most memorable bits. Calling payphones located in places like Times Square and near the Ed Sullivan theater Dave would lure whoever answered the phone into random conversation and even into entering the theater to a standing ovation. This comedy gimmick (used by other…
What was the connection between chronographs and payphones? Find out at WristTimes.com.
UPDATE, OCTOBER, 2014: The trailer for “Hang Up” has been released. Click here to watch. The photo below was taken following the premiere of “Hang Up,” a documentary about New York City payphones by French film maker Ugo Massa. Seen in this photo are myself, Mr. Massa, and John Porter. Mr. Porter owns East Harlem…