I’ve had a YouTube channel for a long time but never really did much with it. Lately I’ve been stuffing it with videos documenting the last payphones of New York, as they continue to fall at a rapid pace.

These removals, as I understood it, typically happen in the dead of night, between midnight and 8am. Thus I never expected to witness one.

But yesterday I happened to pass by a location on 36th Avenue in Astoria where the deed was being done at about 11 in the morning. Two men, working for a company that appeared to be called “Northeast” something, slowly but surely toppled a payphone I had seen standing just 2 minutes earlier. They had already removed another enclosure around the corner, one which had been among the phones I used most frequently when making my Payphone Radio calls.

An abbreviated version of the video I got of this incident is shown here. It really feels, for better or worse, like I captured a small bit of history here.

A longer version showing more detail of what got done to get this payphone out of the way and replaced with a yellow mat is below. The yellow mat is the new piece of street furniture in New York. It seems to signal that a LinkNYC kiosk will soon stand on that spot, where a payphone used to be. But progress in continuing the LinkNYC rollout remains virtually stagnant with no new installations this whole year.

As for the rest of my YouTube channel you’ll find more payphone videos, as well as me playing piano, wandering around cemeteries, talking about random things, and so on. It’s a hodgepodge of stuff, which only recently has me capturing on video more of the dying payphones of New York before they go. I have, of course, taken thousands upon thousands of photos documenting payphones over the years. But something about getting it on video makes the record seem more alive.