I Thought This Was an Advertising Intervention

At a glance this reveal of a payphone advertising panel’s underbelly looked like the work of Art in Ad Places, a syndicate of artists who overlay payphone and bus shelter advertisements with works of art.

In fact it is a legitimate piece of material, a transparent acrylic sheet sold under the brand name Acrylite FF, made by the Evonik CYRO company in Parsippany, NJ. I find no technical specs about this sheet on the company’s website but ProfessionalPlastics.com has everything you need to know about the Acrylite FF.

From reading the spec sheet it seems the display advertising panels were placed under the clear sheet to protect them from corrosive effects of ultraviolet light.

Just a little window into the nuts and bolts of a payphone enclosure’s innards. You won’t be seeing these much longer. What few outdoor payphone enclosures remain in New York are scheduled to be chopped by the end of this year 2021.