No working public telephones remain at Grand Central Terminal, a fact I find not just depressing but unacceptable. Any transit hub as, well, central, as Grand Central has an obligation, I think, to make such fundamental tasks as making a telephone call as accessible as possible to all. Some phones litter the Terminal but none work and none ever will again.

I used these phones quite bit and, as these photos show, so did others. Between the echo-y acoustics of the Terminal itself and the ruggedness of sound passed over the copper landline I found calls from these phones to be, without getting all elegiac, beautiful. Compared to the chirpy, moody, quixotic soundscape of calls made from modern cell phones there was a pleasing restfulness about calls made from these phones.

These phones, formerly owned by Verizon, were acquired by PTS, the nation’s largest payphone service provider, sometime around 2010. They possessed a variety of idiosyncrasies, among them a variety of *## shortcuts that connected you to a daily prayer, Chase Bank, the Social Security Administration and other resources, all for free. Most if not all PTS phones in the U.S. have these shortcuts. *11 and *81 are a lot of fun.

Today the wall once occupied by these four phones (formerly six) is filled with what replaced most of the working payphones at Grand Central Terminal: Advertising. I am no enemy of advertising but if your cell phone is dead these panels aren’t going to do you much good. Citizens are now required to keep their cell phones charged, healthy, and in their possession at all times, an unfortunate and potentially perilous denouement to the decades-long era of publicly accessible communications devices.

This photo is from today. The others are, respectively, from October, 2013; February, 2014; and June, 2012.