This payphone picture was originally posted to my New York City Payphones gallery in the late 1990s. This payphone virtually never worked and was removed many years ago. I did use it, though, when it worked. The last time I tried to use it may have been during the blackout of 2003. I was surprised…
Sometimes I think I see ghosts of phone booths past. Outlines. Shadows. Tracings of where full booths once surrounded and fully enclosed public phones on city streets. Free-standing outdoor phone booths are rare. There are only four phone booths in Manhattan, and when last I looked there were a couple of abandoned booths hulking like…
I call these the Letterman Payphones. The first picture shows a group of payphones as they looked circa 1999. The next photo, from roughly 10 years later, shows that those 3 payphones were replaced by 2, with an advertising-laced enclosure placed over them. I call these the Letterman Payphones because Dave Letterman used to call…
Tomorrow is the anniversary date of the Northeast Blackout of 2003. That was a memorable day for me in many ways but a memory I recall best is this shot of several people lined up to use a payphone at Queensboro Plaza in Queens. This is near the Queensboro/59th Street Bridge, which was the entry…
My friend Rachel directed me to these beautiful old phone booths at the Brooklyn Public Library. The lights are out and the fans do not blow air but the doors close and the phones work. These might be the most perfect booths in all of New York.
These payphones at 1271 6th Avenue are long gone. The first picture shows a cluster of three payphones in either 1999 or 2000. The next two photos show what remains of these phones today, including the spikes in the sidewalk where the base of the payphones used to be.
These pictures show a payphone at 33rd Street and 34th Avenue in Astoria. The first picture is from 1999, the next was taken 10 years later in August, 2009. The payphone location survives, though the phone itself has been swapped. The payphone handset is now bright yellow, replacing the earlier black handset. What I find…
Someone asked me recently “Who the heck uses payphones any more?” My response: Poor people and tourists. As someone in the payphone business once told me, until the world runs out of poor people there will always be a need for payphones. Similarly I think that tourists, especially foreign tourists, will continue to rely on…
This grainy photo, taken with a Treo cell phone camera, shows a real rarity. This is a fully functional rotary dial payphone. This phone is actively used at a business somewhere in the 5 boroughs of New York City. I will not reveal the location of this phone. I have been told by folks who…
Here is a midtown Manhattan public telephone location that has survived the payphone meltdown of the last 15 years. It is located on 6th Avenue near 55th Street. The first picture was taken sometime around 1999, and shows this phone with Bell Atlantic branding. Bell Atlantic swallowed up GTE in June, 2000, and the combined…
The first photo is from May, 2003, and shows a payphone outside of Tiffany Insurance on 36th Avenue and 32nd Street in Astoria. The next two photos are from August, 2009. Tiffany Insurance is still in business but has since moved to another location in Astoria. This payphone disappeared years ago. Only 4 holes and…
I was reminded last week of a project that I have meant to pursue for some time: Then and Now: Payphones of New York. This will, simply, be a series of photos I took over the last 12 or 13 years of public phones in New York with follow-up photos of what those phones look…
Two of my life’s loves meet in this alley near New Calvary Cemetery on Queens Boulevard. It is a payphone at a cemetery. My interest in payphones dates to grade school but in more recent years I have developed an interest in some of the cemeteries and graveyards of New York City — with particular…
It looks like someone at this web site found my photo series of the Last Phone Booths of Manhattan, a series of pictures I posted many years ago after spotting these rare outdoor booths on Manhattan’s West End Avenue. There are, in fact, many phone booths in Manhattan and in all the boroughs of New…
A look at WFMU.org, the web site of WFMU, shows that dial-up Internet users will not be able to access archived version of the freeform station’s programming starting next month: Beginning July 12th, WFMU’s new archives will no longer be available in 20k Real Audio, and this change will affect archive listeners on a dial-up…
There have always been those who find the Payphone Project and ask one question: Why? Why maintain a web site that lists payphone numbers and locations throughout the world? In fact the value of this web site has been written about in many places, most memorably for me in a front page New York Times…
I landed on this product web site through the Random Yahoo Link. This “laser turntable” presents an interesting solution to hearing and enjoying aging LP record collections without jeopardizing their surface. At a cost of $10,990 US I do not anticipate adding the ELP Laser Turntable to my personal arsenal of audio archiving tools. It…
“Are there any news?” is a grammatical pique supposedly coined by newsman Horace Greeley. In reply to that question one of his reporters is said to have replied “Not a new.” If Horace Greeley were looking for payphone news and information today I would have to say there is nary a new, save for the…
NYPIRG’s Straphangers’ Campaign does regular surveys of New York’s subway payphones and the results are pretty consistent: Payphones in subways are unreliable, creating a safety hazard in a place where cell phones still do not work. Read more: New York Daily News Epoch Times NY1 amNY
Here’s hoping you’ve kept your cell phone charged on your next visit to the beach, because in Ocean City, public pay phones are going the way of telephone booths, rotary dialing, and the 10-cent call.Advertisement Telecommunications giant Verizon, in conjunction with the resort’s Public Works office, has removed all but four of its pay phones…
How many college students can you fit into a phone booth? Students at St. Mary’s College of California found an answer to this pressing question Wednesday when teams of men and women competed to cram as many bodies as possible into an empty phone booth on the campus green. The phone booth-stuffing competition took place…
The New York Times reports: “Like the phonograph and the typewriter, the pay phone could one day become an anachronism, the kind of prop seen in period films. “The number of pay phones in the United States fell to about 1.3 million in 2004 from more than 2 million in 2000, according to the latest…
“With the advent of the mobile telephone, telephone booths lie unused. We rediscover this glass cage transformed into an aquarium, full of exotically coloured fish; an invitation to escape and travel.” Read more at Inquisitr.com
A New York Times City Room Blog entry points us to a payphone enclosure which still bore vestiges of the Bell Atlantic brand — a brand which was supposed to have been retired by 2002. I know it is just a blog and not real news but I was surprised that the Times seemed to…
The rot gut and cheap plonk have been pulled from Mike Christison’s shelves, his hope being that the lack of bargain booze will keep the local low-lifes from his liquor store. But it’s the public telephone across the street from the Inglewood Wine Market that’s the real draw for undesirables: The 9 Ave. S.E. phone…
This is a Payphone Project feature from several years ago. My friend Rex drove out to a remote spot in Kansas in search of a lonely payphone he had heard existed. Read the story to find out what he found. Today it would be illegal to find this spot in the way Rex did because…
At first, Ryan Caviglia barely noticed the pay phone that sat on the corner of 65th and Lebanon, just down the street from his house and visible from his porch. But gradually, it began to take over his life. Read more at Philadelphia City Paper
Near the entrance of Ruby Tuesday’s stands a silver box – a shell of the pay phone that used to sit there, with only a rectangular cutout in its metal frame and a “dialing instructions” sign to show that it ever existed. Read more at Naplesnews.com