In the course of writing something else today I discovered that Dennis Novick, among the most flamboyant and colorful characters in the Tri-State area payphone scene, passed away earlier this year.

He and his company, TCC Teleplex, had been on the NYC payphone scene since the early days of deregulation, in 1984, when COCOT phones started competing with AT&T’s payphone monopoly in the U.S.

Dennis was an acquaintance of mine, our connections made entirely through epic-length email correspondences and Twitter Direct Messaging. We shared a mutual skepticism of the LinkNYC product, and a scroll down his extant public Twitter feed shows evidence of his attitudes.

Along with as many as 1,500 regular payphones Dennis produced the first curbside “payphone of the future” in New York and Hoboken and other cities in the region. The TCC Teleplex Internet Phone, which allowed for email, web browsing, and of course telephone calls, numbered in the dozens around New York. They endured on the streets for over a decade.

Other such all-in-one kiosks, most notably the AT&T Public Phone 2000, existed before the TCC Teleplex device. But those AT&T devices were found indoors, at airports, hotels, and convention centers, unexposed to the elements and hazards of public property.

I and the New York Times seem to agree, the TCC Teleplex device was the first “advanced” payphone installed out of doors, at least in New York.

Dennis wasn’t done yet, though. Just this year he patented designs for an “INTERNET ACCESS PORTAL”, referred to in press interviews as the “EVERYTHING KIOSK”.

This device, Dennis Novick’s LinkNYC kiosk killer, would sport a monolith-like design resembling LinkNYC but with a somewhat meatier profile and, tantalizingly, a physical telephone handset. That handset would prevent everyone in the area from overhearing both sides of your phone conversations, and also eliminate the scourge of ice cream truck music blasting from a loudspeaker.

I don’t know what the status of the Everything Kiosk product is, or ever really was, or what Dennis’s passing means for the future of the Everything Kiosk, or for TCC Teleplex itself. The patent was approved just weeks before Dennis’s passing.

The Teleplex website (presently not working) had some publicity materials about the Everything Kiosk, including a rendering of one such machine at the Port Authority Bus Terminal. I can’t find anything on that rendering now but it was hilarious. It made the machine look like some kind of kiosk-on-steroids superhero.

The patent documents provide a decent reference for a piece of urban furniture we might just see yet, but I would like to find that illustrated rendering. It did not make it to the Wayback Machine.

Dennis was an interesting guy who I wish I could have known better. A sculptor and talented artist who somehow got into payphones, with a huge personality and a lot to him I would never have keyed into just through email.