Any endeavor which depends on the reliability of the public telephone is imperiled from the start. I was glad to catch at least this one segment today, from a musician who is unnamed because no identifying information was to be seen at his performance space.
There are only two payphones left on the upper level of the Grand Central subway station. Neither one works.
This one starts out a little rough but ends up being among the best quality recordings I've gotten of musicians recorded through NYC's subway payphones.
Up to twenty VOIP phones along a Manhattan Avenue were connected one by one, creating a snapshot of sound comprising all that the phones could capture over the distance of about a mile. City noises and car horns mix with occasionally intelligible words spoken by passers by. It forms a lightly organized cacophony that actually…
Talk about phone booth fighting. This Associated Press story from 1984 makes a common payphone sound like a savage murderer.
For 50 years the Benner-Nawman company made phone booths and payphone gear they said "may take a mauling but you can keep on calling." But did they really have a payphone in the middle of California's Nicasio Reservoir?
Nortel, the largest phone company in Norway, has preserved about 100 of its classic red phone boxes. There used to be over 6000 such "little red houses" in use throughout the country.
"Cabine of the Dead" from French director Vincent Templement is good old-fashioned zombie phone booth fun to start your week.
Maestro Moses Josiah's Musical Saw sounds mysterious and strange when heard through a public pay telephone. Listen through the crackle of the landline as he plays John Lennon's "Imagine" at the Times Square subway station.
A Rockefeller Center payphone customer spotted April 12, 2016; using a PTS (Pacific Telemanagement Services) payphone.
The best way to be heard and clearly understood when placing a call through a Link is to yell. That appears to be what happened in this audio capture, where a LinkNYC enthusiast encountered one of the devices.
Payphones make frequent appearances in TMITHC, a fantasy/science fiction series which explores the hypothetical reality of what North America might look like had the Axis powers won World War II.
Once in a while in my research a charming cultural relic surfaces, such as this peppy New York Telephone commercial from 1987. This 60-second television spot shows several actors recreating real-world scenes of people using payphones in ways once common in New York.
This payphone stood strong throughout the second biggest snowstorm in NYC history.
Houston, Texas, boasts the nation's 2nd largest payphone population. A StreetView tour shows areas where they can be found every couple of blocks.
This seasonally tinctured film from IYOBOSA STUDIOS tells the story of "Laura from the Bronx", who answers a ringing payphone to play the fictional game of "The Payphone Millionaire".
Whenever I hear a subway busker or street musician performing I look for the nearest payphone. If one is nearby, and if it works, I call a number to leave a recording of the sound. It is a very hit-or-miss pursuit with a lot of wasted quarters.
“Hang Up”, the New York City payphone documentary to which I contributed, is now viewable on the public Internet for the first time since its premiere last year. I attended the first public showings of “Hang Up” in NYC theaters. Once I got over the gobsmacked weirdness of seeing my aging face on a gigantic movie screen…
A charming photo from the NYC nostalgia blog in which a 1980s payphone user partly obscures a sign for the "Queensboro Ave." subway stop, a station and streetname I've never heard of.
Pundits and techies pounced on the appearance of a flip phone in the video for Adele’s latest song “Hello”, calling it all kinds of ridiculous. According to director Xavier Dolan, however, it is the grizzled, overgrown British K2 phone box which appears later in the video that has far more significance.
"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.
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.
Yesterday’s “European Payphone Chase” featured photos from film director Ugo Massa and others who have discovered that payphones are hiding in plain sight all around them. Today’s image is from Mr. Massa’s father, Maxime Massa, who recently traveled to Jakarta where he captured this photo of a Telkom Indonesia payphone. This phone is, of course, stuffed with bicycle helmets.
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.
From the midst of Mitchell Kanashkevich’s stupendous photo essay Mauritania, the Most Amazing Place You’ll Probably Never Visit rises an image of what must surely be among the world’s most primitive phone booths still in operation.
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.
Philadelphia, a city of two million, has a fair share of payphones on its city streets, at least in the Center City area I visited a few weeks ago. In this photo essay I share 43 up close photos from Philadelphia’s Center City payphones, which range in condition from fully functional to utterly abused and abandoned.