Is that really a Verizon payphone?

Actually, no. The bedraggled Verizon name crowning this curbside payphone belies the fact that it is now owned by Van Wagner, a display advertising company which recently made waves by offering free public Wi-Fi access at some of its payphone kiosks. This and hundreds of other payphones were recently acquired by Van Wagner as Verizon continues its plan to abandon payphones.

The Verizon name on top of this and other such phones could soon be covered or removed, or it could just stay around indefinitely. It is not unusual to see names of multiple telecom companies on payphones. AT&T’s brand still sits atop some midtown Manhattan payphones, even though that company exited the payphone business years ago.

This recent development in New York City payphones probably caught the attention of absolutely nobody but it represents a rare bit of good news for those of us who still use public telephones and whose disaster-scenario planning includes knowing where to find a public phone in an emergency.

With Verizon’s stable of outdoor payphones handed off to Van Wagner the telecom giant has continued to follow through on its pledge to fully exit the payphone and calling card business. Verizon, though still under contract with the city to maintain its payphones through 2014, has pre-emptively begun transferring ownership of those payphone assets to companies like Van Wagner and Pacific Telemanagement Services (PTS), the California-based company that acquired all of the payphones in New York City’s subway system earlier this year.

Verizon has effectively abandoned maintenance and repair of its outdoor public phones, but Van Wagner does not appear to have acquired all of Verizon’s payphones. A number of fully-branded Verizon payphones still stand at attention on curbs and outside buildings. In my tests I found that not a single one of them worked.

These two phones in Long Island City are dead to the world:

This lonely old phone across the street from a cemetery is as dead as everything else in the area.

This bit of graffiti, scrawled on a nearby lightpost, seems to be a cry for help from the soul of Verizon’s abandoned payphone, crying for mercy, begging for its dial tone to come back alive.

I don’t know about others but for me there is a special joy in picking up a payphone and hearing a dial tone – especially when that soothing perfect-fourth sound comes from a payphone that had been out of service for months or even years. Van Wagner has brought a number of my favorite payphone locations back to life (yes, I do have favorites) and I hope that others appreciate this as much as I. I think the Van Wagner acquisition portends a future in which public telephones become free for callers.

This development partly makes up for a recent routing out of other company’s standalone payphones throughout the 5 boroughs.

It remains to be seen how long Van Wagner can support these phones. Standalone payphones have limited capacity for income sources other than coin-paid and credit card calls. Payphones today survive mostly on income from display advertising, corporate subsidies, and what could be described as outright philanthropy.

The curbside payphone, with limited capacity for monetization from display advertising, is the most endangered form of public telephone.